Being Digital - Softcover

Negroponte, Nicholas

3.81

2,379 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340649305 ISBN 13: 9780340649305

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1996

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Aimed at the non-expert, this is a guide to survival on the information superhighway.

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Review:

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 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.

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