Being Digital

by Nicholas Negroponte, Marty Asher (Editor)

Overview

In lively, mordantly witty prose, Negroponte decodes the mysteries—and debunks the hype—surrounding bandwidth, multimedia, virtual reality, and the Internet, and explains why such touted innovations as the fax and the CD-ROM are likely to go the way of the BetaMax. "Succinct and readable. . . . If you suffer from digital anxiety . . . here is a book that lays it all out for you."—Newsday.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679439196
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/01/1995
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 8.71(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Negroponte is the author of the bestseller Being Digital, which has been translated into more than 40 languages. Negroponte is the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, which he directed for its first 20 years. A graduate of MIT, Negroponte is considered a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design. He gave the first TED talk in 1984 and has given over a dozen more since. He founded the non-profit One Laptop per Child, which deployed $1 billion of laptops for primary education in the developing world.

Table of Contents

Part One: Bits Are Bits

1: The DNA of Information

2: Debunking Bandwidth

3: Bitcasting

4: The Bit Police

5: Commingled Bits

6: The Bit Business

Part Two: Interface

7: Where People and Bits Meet

8: Graphical Persona

9: 20/20 VR

10: Looking and Feeling

11: Can We Talk About This?

12: Less Is More

Part Three: Digital Life

13: The Post-Information Age

14: Prime Time Is My Time

15: Good Connections

16: Hard Fun

17: Digital Fables and Foibles

18: The New E-xpressionists

Epilogue: An Age of Optimism

After Words

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

Negroponte, a Wired columnist and founder of MIT's Media Lab, presents an accessible guide to the cutting edge of digital technology and his predictions for its future. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Negroponte, popular columnist for Wired magazine and founding director for the MIT Media Lab, describes how advancements in computer technology and telecommunications will transform workplaces, households, and educational institutions. He explains how this revolution will change the way we live, think, and interact with one another and with technology and foresees some mind-boggling challenges that lie ahead in developing truly global systems for delivering multimedia and other forms of digitally based information. Negroponte characterizes the development of future information delivery systems as a battle between atoms, the components of books and other physical resources, and bits, the basic building blocks of information. In 1991, he predicted the eventual demise of libraries, those vast storehouses of atoms, in favor of bit-based purveyors of information. An important work for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/94.]-Joe Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago

Library Journal

The success of "Wired" magazine, for whom Negroponte writes, has probably been a surprise to a great many people, so Knopf's gamble on the title reviewed here is perhaps not as crazy as it seems. Nevertheless, a first printing of 100,000 copies seems ambitious for a book without sensation, romance, pictures, or a flashy design. Are there really so many who care about fiber optics, GUIs, ISDN, and compression technologies? How about those clamoring to read sentences like "Computer networks, on the other hand, are a lattice of heterogeneous processors, any of which can act both as source and sink." To be fair, this is not an especially difficult book to read, and the author defines his terms in the simplest possible language. Nonetheless, Negroponte's long, poorly structured essay about the future of digital technology, though written in a breezy style by a writer as qualified as anyone to offer an opinion on these matters, is never quite gripping. Anyone with some interest in the subject will value the sometimes original and occasionally contrarian ideas, and for many people, one supposes, a peek at the future of digital technology is to some degree intriguing. Still, it seems safe to say that the number of people who read this book from cover to cover will be far fewer than 100,000. Publicity alone may generate some demand, of course, so libraries should be prepared but should not overbuy.

Stuart Whitwell

"The finest, most understandable explanation of the digital revolution to date....Being Digital is a visionary work, written by one of this planet's masters of media."—The Christian Science Monitor

"Being Digital flows from the pen (or cursor) of a wizard who is himself helping to create the new cosmos into which we are hurtling....To read Being Digital is to enter the future it describes."—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher