Being Digital - Nicholas Negroponte

Hardback, 243pp, £12.99, Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 0-340-64525-3

This book is a collection of 18 short essays. Revisits to articles previously published in Wired magazine, of which he is the founder. Each essay is self contained making it possible to read the book in a random-access manner. You really can open the book anywhere and start reading, thought the downside is a somewhat rambling feel and where a topic can be touched on several times. In particular Negroponte does have a bee in his bonnet about the hash all the world have made of High Definition TV.

The purpose of the book is to extol the virtues of being digital, by reflecting on the difference between atoms and bits. Atoms are the thing that we ship all around the world in the name of trade. They are physical entities, they have shape, weight and mass. Bits on the other hand are just electronic pulses that can be broadcast via a variety of means instantly around the world. Negroponte makes the point that his notebook computer only costs a thousand bucks, but the bits stored on it could be worth millions. Even in the ‘information age’ most of our information is delivered as atoms in the form of newspapers, books and magazines. The World-wide Web has started to change this and Negroponte envisages what will happen in the future when TV, Multimedia, the Internet merge to provide personal narrowcasting. The provision of news and information specifically tailored to the individual by the use of Internet agents that will automatically sniff-out and collate information and deliver it to our screens.

The style of the book is immediately accessible written in an easy to read fashion. Although discussing technical and far-reaching issues it conveys these concepts in simple language that anyone can understand. The book is very upbeat as you would expect from an technology enthusiast, but the epilogue does touch on the down-side of being digital. The world and the way we work will change and there will be losers as well as winners when we stop shifting atoms around.

Negroponte is the Director of MIT’s Media Lab. He is a clever man no doubt, but there is a ‘what-a-clever-dick-I-am’ feeling about the book. Every essay references at least one piece of important work Negroponte himself or MIT have instigated, but that said we do need visionaries who can see, or at least guess, the future. Anyone who intends to be around for the next few years should read this book.

Rating: ****