Being Digital

Nicholas Negroponte

Reviewed by: Lisa DeJong

Written in 1995 by the founder of MIT’s Media Lab (the birthplace of multimedia), Being Digital is a loosely structured mixture of lessons on the history of digital devices, commentary on the political landscape impacting the evolution of the digital age, and insights into the future of the digital hardware and multimedia. The value of the book lies in the latter of these three categories; the history sections contain entertaining anecdotes but are fairly elementary, and the political commentary provides only a biased opinion on a subject the reader knows (and most likely cares) very little about. The predictions of the future of the digital age are somewhat fascinating, however, because they were written five years ago and have in many cases proven to be at least directionally correct.

One of the trends Negroponte correctly predicted was a shift in the location of improvements in intelligence and sophistication in a media broadcast away from the point of origin of the broadcast (i.e., cable companies and TV networks sending more programs at higher resolution) and toward the receiver of the broadcast (i.e., smart TVs that provide on-demand viewings of programs and movies). This prediction was based on basic research that indicated that most people value a personalized viewing experience more highly than greater selection and incrementally improved picture quality. Negroponte suggests that in the future the broadcasting bandwidth will be used to deliver one customized program to each of a thousand people, rather than one thousand programs to all thousand people.

Being Digital also provides a glimpse at where the current trajectory of the multimedia industry is headed: towards a time when information (e.g., a weather report) is sent to an individual as a total sensory experience – a package of bits which can be readily translated into whatever format the user desires to receive the information. For example, the weather report could be delivered as written words on a screen or the newscaster’s voice through headphones if the user is sitting on a train and doesn’t wish to bother others, or as a virtual 3-D model of the weather system if the user is at home in his living room.

Negroponte accurately predicts that advances in the user-friendliness of computers will graduate beyond improvements to on-screen windows and start to include fundamental changes in the way we interact with computers. He suggests that our personal machines will eventually be able to recognize not only our voices, but will be able to see our faces and understand our expressions. Computers will become true digital assistants, in that they will exhibit tact, timing, and discretion when reminding us of commitments and recommending courses of action.

A final prediction in Being Digital for which there have been recent signs that Negroponte was correct in his insights is the evolution of the smart household. Negroponte describes a living environment consisting of a network of intelligent appliances and devices that communicate with each other freely so that, for example, when we hit our snooze buttons some day in the future, our coffeemaker will delay percolating our morning cups an additional nine minutes.