Being Digital

Being Digital
by Nicholas Negroponte

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About Book

Amazon.com
As the founder of MIT's Media Lab and a popular columnist for Wired, Nicholas Negroponte has amassed a following of dedicated readers. Negroponte's fans will want to get a copy of Being Digital, which is an edited version of the 18 articles he wrote for Wired about "being digital."

Negroponte's text is mostly a history of media technology rather than a set of predictions for future technologies. In the beginning, he describes the evolution of CD-ROMs, multimedia, hypermedia, HDTV (high-definition television), and more. The section on interfaces is informative, offering an up-to-date history on visual interfaces, graphics, virtual reality (VR), holograms, teleconferencing hardware, the mouse and touch-sensitive interfaces, and speech recognition.

In the last chapter and the epilogue, Negroponte offers visionary insight on what "being digital" means for our future. Negroponte praises computers for their educational value but recognizes certain dangers of technological advances, such as increased software and data piracy and huge shifts in our job market that will require workers to transfer their skills to the digital medium. Overall, Being Digital provides an informative history of the rise of technology and some interesting predictions for its future.

From Publishers Weekly
In an upbeat primer on the information revolution, Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab and a columnist for Wired, says we are making a transition to a "post-information age" where digitized transmissions will become extremely personalized. He predicts that interactive multimedia will become more booklike, for example, a TV or video program with which you can curl up and either have a conversation or be told a story. In his scenario, the personal computer-gateway to a multitude of information and entertainment services-will replace the TV set, and by 2005 Americans will spend more hours on the Internet than watching network TV. Negroponte also describes the Media Lab's teaching of learning-disabled children, critiques U.S. TV manufacturers' approach to high-definition television, touts the advantages of E-mail over the uneconomical fax machine ("a step backward") and ruminates on the emerging global digitized workplace. 100,000 first printing; BOMC selection; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
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.
--Joe Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

George Gilder, author of Microcosm
With the visionary insights of McLuhan, the humor and lucidity of Feynman, Being Digital is the PowerBook for the nineties and beyond...A brilliant and bitwise book.

From Booklist
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

Midwest Book Review
Society has long struggled to understand how the electronic exchange of information will change human relations: Negroponte, founding director of MIT's Media Lab, narrows its focus to the role of bits and their applications to electronic data retrieval. This may sound limited in scope; but it actually holds vast implications for society; from understanding changing copyright issues to global communication.

Review
"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 Trade Paperback edition.

Book Description
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.

From the Publisher
Whether or not you've been an avid reader of Negroponte's pithy yet seminal monthly columns in Wired Magazine, this book will convince you of the grand and authoritative scope of his vision of current and future communication and computing technologies.

From the Publisher
"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

Inside Flap Copy
1 CD / 72 minutes
Read by Penn Jillette
Also available on cassette

I hate Negroponte. He's always right." - Teller

Being Digital is both a guide to the present state of our rapidly-changing digital age and a map for the future--how our lives will be shaped and enhanced by computer-related technology. Negroponte--Wired Magazine columnist and founding director of 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 the 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.

The digital age is coming, Negroponte says, and it "cannot be denied or stopped....We're discussing a fundamental cultural change: Computing is not about computers, it's about life; being digital is not just being a geek or Internet surfer or mathematically savvy child, it's actually a way of living and is going to impact absolutely everything."

About the Author
About the Reader
Penn Jillette won an Obie and an Emmy for his theater and television performances with his partner, Teller. Together they have also written two bestselling books. On his own, Penn is the voice of Comedy Central and lectures at various computer and science conferences.

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