Being Digital - Hardcover

Negroponte, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679439196 ISBN 13: 9780679439196

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1995

Synopsis

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 Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679439196
• ISBN 13: 9780679439196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256