Being Digital
by Nicholas Negroponte · first published 1995
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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.
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Reminds me of Negroponte's observation (in his book Being Digital from sometime in the mid 1990s). At the time, digital television was hung up in debates about what high-definition standard to use. He said that for most people most of the time, standard def was fine…
on “You Don’t Get to Define ‘Quality’ ” ↗Doesn't bother me in the least. I am in the camp with Nicholas Negroponte who in his book Being Digital dismissed HD video as a waste of bandwidth, arguing that the same bandwidth should be used for more personalized, interactive experiences. Basically standard def video is fine for almost any entertainmment.…
on “Japan Will Make Its Last VCR This Month” ↗I was more reminded of Nicholas Negroponte's 1995 book Being Digital in which he said (paraphrasing based on recollection) that HDTV was a mistake; that we we could do better things with digital television than simply increasing the resolution. Retina may be great, seen…
on “Predictions.txt” ↗…to read or listen to. He has several interviews on YouTube. Esther Dyson (Freeman's daughter) and Nicholas Negroponte were others I read growing up along the lines of Toffler. I remember the latter's Being Digital as being profound at the time but passe in today's world since all of the marvels of the future he talks about came to fruition. Negroponte also came up with the One Laptop Per Child which lost it's relevance…
on “Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87” ↗…constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital." --- http://laptop.org/vision/mission/ If you read more about constructionism at http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html, you will see that it is consonant with the freedom "to…
on “Richard Stallman on the Failure of One Laptop Per Child & his new laptop” ↗One of the most interesting claims in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (1996) was that bandwidth would be the same into and out of the home, and that home servers would be ubiquitous. I think his key example was the idea of live video exchange between grandparents and grandchildren.…
on “Google Fiber Continues Awful ISP Tradition of Banning “Servers”” ↗…piece http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/02/15/the-fantastic-apple-car...), but when the NY Times suggests that Apple specializes in mobility and electronics it seems to make the car seem more likely. In "Being Digital" Negroponte made the insightful assertion that the wired / wireless world was flipping -- TVs were becoming wired while phones and computers were becoming wireless (TVs have kind of flipped again since…
on “Apple Poaching Auto Engineers to Build Battery Division” ↗FYI if it's the bits/atoms treatment you're specifically interested in reading about, it goes back to at least 1995 from Nicholas Negroponte. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital
on “Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later?” ↗…recognition (or not) that we are in an accelerated information processing age where the wiring of information flows in society is upgraded dramatically. While this realization is not new (from Negroponte's Being Digital [1] to the perennial VC cry "software will eat the world") the disruption story is for at least two decades broadcast to deafening volumes. But it is by no means universally adopted. For most organizations…
on “What Silicon Valley “Gets” about Software Engineers” ↗…https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html (content warning: not safe for muslims, page contains nude photography) The only computer book authors that I personally know are Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital) and Michael Dertouzos (What Will Be). When these books were new, they were in a big stack at the front of every bookstore in the United States. The authors were interviewed on the radio, on TV, in…
on “Z-Library admins "escape house arrest" after judge approves U.S. extradition” ↗