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Loading... Being digitalby Nicholas Negroponte
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. excellent explanation of digital television, etc.; he had at the time a clear understanding of the way trends were leading  francesanngray | Mar 6, 2008 |  I remember reading this book and Tim taught me how to count in "digital." I promptly forgot. This book is well written. Also, my dad served as Econ counselor to Ambassador John Negroponte (Nicholas's brother) in the 80s in Honduras. (  ) sarahlouise | Sep 21, 2007 | The book you are holding is probably obsolete: it consists of atoms, which are bulky and cumbersome to transport. And, increasingly, the dominant units of human interaction are bits -- "the DNA of information" that has made possible everything from personal computers to CDs. Now the full implications of this sea change are made comprehensible in a landmark book by Nicholas Negroponte, who as a columnist for Wired magazine and a founder of MIT's Media Lab may be the Thomas Jefferson of the digital revolution. Being Digital decodes the mysteries and debunks the hype surrounding bandwidth, multimedia, virtual reality, and the Internet. It forecasts technologies that will make your telephone as context-sensitive as an English butler and replace TV broadcasters with intelligent "broadcatchers" that assemble and deliver only the programming you want. And this lively, breathtakingly timely book suggests what being digital will mean for our laws, education, politics, and amusements -- in short, for the way we live. 1  rajendran | Mar 6, 2007 | Reviewing this book again 10 years later, it's fantastic to see just how much of what he wrote then is today concidered just a part of the norm of life. Highly recomended! (  ) Nagel_Family_Library | Sep 7, 2006 | Worth reading now in the same way that most old futurism is worth reading, as a lesson in humility. Still, even back then, the wild-eyed, heedless promises of digitization being able to slice bread, wash your underwear, perform rhinoplasty and usher in a boundless era of unending world peace ought to have occasioned a few more doubts than they evidently did. (  ) TimothyBurke | Aug 6, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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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.
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:33:04 -0500)
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