Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital is an intriguing and, if you appreciate his writing style, enjoyable discussion of what has been and may come to be in the world of bits.  Delivered in journalistic prose that swings between giddy and acerbic, Being Digital is a celebration of all things digital, from communications and entertainment to education and everyday life.

Negroponte is a technological power to be reckoned with and clearly knows his stuff: he is a founder of MIT’s Media Lab, a “Salon des Refusés” (his term, not mine) for tech-heads, and has been mucking around on the bleeding edge for some 30 years.  Yet despite this background, his book offers a facile view on digital life.  The target audience is clearly those who were checked out during the technological revolution of the 1990s.  Negroponte himself singles out old-economy business executives, parents, and politicians in his introduction to the book, and suggests that writing it was a desperate attempt to help these people catch up with digital society.

Given that Negroponte is a columnist for Wired magazine, it should come as no surprise that many of the concepts and predictions that he puts forward have appeared in the popular press.  To lay the groundwork for his sometimes Orwellian predictions of the future of computing, Negroponte provides a history of media technologies, complete with explanations of faxes, television, bandwidth and modems, networks, holography and virtual reality, the Internet and the World Wide Web.  It is important to note that the book is now five years old, which of course is a lifetime on the Internet.  At the time of writing, some of these ideas were radical dreams.  Many of the concepts are now in the mainstream: bots and shopping assistants, push content, digital assistants and personae (such as MSOffice’s Clippie and the now-defunct SuperPup).  Other Nostradamus-esque predictions are still out there: smart homes and intelligent, networked appliances; on-demand television broadcasting (although TiVo is trying to change that right now); personal fiber connections to the Web; truly ubiquitous communications devices woven into your clothing; wrist-mounted computing à la Dick Tracy.  This was my second time reading Being Digital, and it was interesting to note how the digital world changed during the intervening period.

 Negroponte proffers valuable discussion about the legal implications of the digital world.  He acknowledges that copyright law “is a Gutenberg artifact.”  Unfortunately, he merely identifies the many ways copyrights can be violated, and offers no suggestions how to address the issues.  Interestingly, he cites visual art and data as major copyright battlegrounds, but makes only passing mention of the burgeoning problem of music piracy (I guess he didn’t envision Napster).  His discussion about privacy issues, although very brief and relegated to his postscript, is insightful and hits dead-on the major points of exposure in cyberspace.  Congress needs to listen more closely to what Negroponte has to say.

 On balance, Being Digital is an interesting chronology of the information age, presented in an accessible, engaging format to keep even the most technologically illiterate reader in the loop.

 -Matt Benko