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Being Digital
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "Succinct and readable.... If you suffer from digital anxiety ... here is a book that lays it all out for you." -- Newsday
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.
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.
255 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 108 reviews
April 13, 2012
This book is like my Bible in digital journey. I keep rereading it to find inspiration. My fave part is when Negroponte writes that he has seen a prototyp
e of touchscreen computer in early 1970s. Wow. Now people feel they are holding tech if they carry new tab, something which arent new at all
e of touchscreen computer in early 1970s. Wow. Now people feel they are holding tech if they carry new tab, something which arent new at all
February 21, 2007
I read this ten years ago and remember it as one of the most prescient books ever. Negroponte spends a and elot of time filling in the gaps between what you were supposed to know in the late 90's about the rise of the digital era, and what you actually absorbed from everyone else who were also just pretending to know what the difference between digital and analog meant.
He's got a lot of really interesting predictions for the near future, many of which have proven correct.
Do you know why CDs and MP3's are not as true-sounding as tapes and vinyl records?
Do you understand the foundations of artificial intelligence?
If either of these answers are no, then you're either already behind the understanding of your times or you're about to be. Read Negroponte's book and save yourself!
He's got a lot of really interesting predictions for the near future, many of which have proven correct.
Do you know why CDs and MP3's are not as true-sounding as tapes and vinyl records?
Do you understand the foundations of artificial intelligence?
If either of these answers are no, then you're either already behind the understanding of your times or you're about to be. Read Negroponte's book and save yourself!
August 6, 2007
this is a seminal book on media - now we have the luxury of looking back and see if most of Negroponte's predictions have come true - and how it affect our lives. If you read this first, you will find Friedman's "The World is Flat" as merely a follower - since most of the things he found as an amazing way the world works nowadays were already in Negroponte's list 10 years earlier.
October 18, 2020
This book published in the same period of Windows 95 and Netscape makes a hallmark of the technoculture of this era. The main focus is on how to encode the real world information digitally - the discussion was from music to video. He emphasized on the spread of knowledge and its affordability. Naturally, the problem is about how to condense information as much as possible for Internet transition (whose broadband was very limited at the time). Remember, it was 10 years before YouTube came into existence. We came very far. Yet, I'd say we are still in transition to digitize the real-world 3D moving objects for our autonomous cars after more than 2 decades.
He correctly predicted the effect of globalization with an additional 2 billion population coming from China and India, email making work possible on Sunday (though Americans hate it as much as Japanese or Europeans unlike his claim), and the era of VR and its challenge ahead to cut down on lag time (even though we are still far away from the mass spread).
He closes the book with the points about job displacement from automation. The professional cameraman and videographers faced lower wage pressure. Journalists went through a similar experience. But I don't know if it's because of the automation. It's hard to nail down. And it creates lots of jobs as well such as YouTubers and social media manager. It's safe to say the radical change in society creates and destroys jobs at the same time.
Throughout he mentions nothing about artificial intelligence which dominates today's technoculture discussion. They claim the same automation and job displacement. It's important to pick which area will face wage pressure in our era.
He correctly predicted the effect of globalization with an additional 2 billion population coming from China and India, email making work possible on Sunday (though Americans hate it as much as Japanese or Europeans unlike his claim), and the era of VR and its challenge ahead to cut down on lag time (even though we are still far away from the mass spread).
He closes the book with the points about job displacement from automation. The professional cameraman and videographers faced lower wage pressure. Journalists went through a similar experience. But I don't know if it's because of the automation. It's hard to nail down. And it creates lots of jobs as well such as YouTubers and social media manager. It's safe to say the radical change in society creates and destroys jobs at the same time.
Throughout he mentions nothing about artificial intelligence which dominates today's technoculture discussion. They claim the same automation and job displacement. It's important to pick which area will face wage pressure in our era.
January 26, 2013
Prophetic. Although very ironic that the only way to read it is in atom form, instead of bit form.
February 18, 2022
“Ease of use” has been such a compelling goal that we sometimes forget that many people don’t want to use the machine at all. They want to get something done.
I have no real idea why I haven’t read this book until now. Possibly my poor experience with Amusing Ourselves to Death which tends to be recommended on the same lists as this one. The two are completely different. Negroponte understands technology and how it plays into progress in a way that Postman doesn’t. This is a book that looks to the future instead of the past.
Many of the issues Negroponte identifies as important remain with us today, sadly so. Negroponte must die a little inside every time he receives an advertisement for something he already bought. His future is one in which advertisements are more interesting because they target what you are planning to buy, not what you most recently ordered.
The problem, I suspect, is that while AI and data gathering has reached the point where what we’re looking for can be easily predicted, certain kinds of data have become more tightly-protected than others. That you’ve been searching for a toaster is cheap information and readily shared. The fact that you’ve already bought that toaster, the most critical bit of information, is the one bit that isn’t shared. The one retailer that knows this information isn’t willing to sell it cheaply.
He is, and, I suspect, remains, very critical about the unbelievable lack of responsive intelligence in computers. While the ability of computers—mostly our phones—to detect our location and make predictions from it, and to respond to simple voice requests, is a vast improvement over 1995, computers still do not even bother trying to respond to the tone of our voice, nor do our various devices pool their knowledge about us to make better guesses about what they should do.
Personal computers are less able to sense human presence than are modern toilets or outdoor floodlights that have simple motion sensors. Your inexpensive auto-focus camera has more intelligence about what is in front of it than any terminal or computer system.
While modern phones do now at least use the same intelligence about what is in front of it as old cameras did, they still mostly use this only for the purposes that the old camera did: for taking pictures. Negroponte’s basic complaint about computers not using what’s right in front of them for purposes of making our lives easier remains valid and inexplicable.
Agents, pieces of software that do what we want with only minimal initial prompting, were a big deal when he wrote this, and he wants agents that are as useful as human agents. He often uses examples of digital agents that turn out to be his son (who is his interface with the VCR) or his sister-in-law (who combines expertise on current movies with her knowledge of his family’s tastes in movies to provide highly accurate recommendations).
What we need to build is a digital sister-in-law.
While this book holds up surprisingly well, there are assumptions that turned out to be laughably wrong; as befits such assumptions, they’re never directly stated. But despite recognizing that computing power would become intensely portable, there is still an assumption that hardwired telephones would remain a thing, whether because telephones need power separate from a building’s electrical system, or that smart devices would ring the phone nearest the targeted user. The former could be read as complaining about how outdated assumptions hold progress back, but not the latter.
There are also things that it’s surprising, not that he missed them, but that they didn’t even exist in 1995. Text messaging on cell phones, for example, has become so ubiquitous, and so useful, and is so simple, it’s hard to conceive that it was only introduced to the public in 1993 or 1994—and then only on one carrier in Finland. Had he written this book only a year later he almost certainly would have written the chapter on asynchronous communication almost entirely differently.
Instead, he uses email as the paragon of asynchronous communication, and while he certainly expects advances on that to make it even easier and more ingrained in daily life, the fact that he missed what was going on in Finland and Norway is hardly surprising.
That both of his big misses were about telephones, in a book about ubiquitous communications, is probably more telling. He clearly expected that advancements were going to come from advancements in personal computing and personal computing networks such as the Internet. While SMS nowadays uses the computers in our pockets that he predicted and the computer networks that he assumed they’d be connected to, initial text messaging was grafted onto portable telephones and telephone service.
That’s partly because he is understandably contemptuous of then-current telephone technology. He recognized a big difference between the mindset of telephone manufacturers and the mindset of computer/software manufacturers. Telephones were mired in feature bloat.
…telephone designs have been “featured” to death. Number storing, redialing, credit card management, call waiting, call forwarding, autoanswering, number screening, and on and on are constantly being squeezed onto the real estate of a thin appliance that fits in the palm of your hand, making it virtually impossible to use.
Not only do I not want all those features; I don’t want to dial the telephone at all. Why can’t telephone designers understand that none of us want to dial telephones? We want to reach people on the telephone.
The problem, he writes, requires not so much a redesign of the handset, “but in the design of a robot secretary that can fit in your pocket.”
Given what else he’s written, I suspect he’s not at all surprised that the first steps toward our robot secretary came not from telephone manufacturers but from a computer company.
Likewise, he expected that real advances in television would come from the computer end and not the television end. He accused television manufacturers and regulators of being, like the telephone companies, too mired in the technology and the delivery rather than the experience. The HDTV proposals making their way through the regulatory bureaucracies were hard coding too much about what televisions should do and what broadcasts should contain. My own experience is that this is exactly what happened, and broadcast television is suffering from it. What we should have done is to:
…stop thinking of TV’s future as only high definition and begin to build it in its most general form, bit radiation, TV becomes a totally different medium. We will then start to witness many creative and engaging new applications on the information superhighway. That is, unless we are stopped by the Bit Police.
The “Bit Police” being the licensors and regulators who can’t escape wanting to “control the medium itself” instead of allowing the content flowing through the medium to grow into what people want.
The result is that something Negroponte thought impossibly ridiculous, vertical pan-and-scan, is now routine (actually, content is probably just chopped equallly off the top and bottom of the video, rather than there being any attempt to intelligently chop the video). Rather than displaying the data in a window appropriate to the content, the content is mangled to make it appropriate to the medium. Even the computer company that both overcame telephone feature bloat and introduced windowing to the public has a TV box that doesn’t allow content to flow appropriately. How can it? The mangling of the content is hard-coded in the signal.
Television isn’t the only field I suspect he’s frustrated with thirty years later.
We may be a society with far fewer learning-disabled children and far more teaching-disabled environments than currently perceived.
The ability of computers and computer networks to cater to every child as if they were an individual with a unique learning style is probably the single saddest missed opportunity of the digital age. Like broadcast television, and like the telephone before the iPhone, our educational establishment is focused entirely on the medium rather than on either the content (knowledge), the customer (parents), or the recipient (children).
Negroponte’s vision of teaching-by-exploration, of “hard fun”, has been mostly ignored except for a few non-traditional schools at best ridiculed but mostly ignored by the establishment.
There is some evidence that parents’ experiences over the last few years of shutdowns and masking children (I fear some of the resistance to removing masks from children among teachers is that masked children are exactly what they imagine as the perfect student: faceless receptacles of mass wisdom) are moving them to individualize their children’s learning.
Hopefully it continues. The capability was almost there then, and is definitely here now; but it remains frustratingly untapped.
The idea that twenty years from now you will be talking to a group of eight-inch-high holographic assistants walking across your desk is not farfetched. What is certain is that voice will be your primary channel of communication between you and your interface agents.
November 8, 2023
La claridad mental de ese señor en cuanto a lo que vendría. Yo lo leí hoy, pero haberlo leído hace 30 años… con razón lo miraban sospechosamente. Tenías razón, Nicholas.
August 20, 2021
Outdated, but in a good way. Some amazing predictions for decades ahead. I still have one question about the language. Every single prediction and sci-fi movie since the dawn of computing has been predicting natural language as the primary interface to computers. After years of advances, it's still barely used for some very basic commands in simple scenarios.
October 17, 2015
If you can get past the arrogant author talking about how great and right he is, as well as personal anecdotes that are little more than elitist bragging, there are some neat tidbits of information here. Negroponte was pretty darn accurate with some of his predictions, and only off by 5-10 years with others; though this isn't really an amazing feat for someone in his line of work. Parts of the book are pretty dull, but at least it's separated into many small sections and short chapters for easy scanning.
My favourite part of Being Digital was learning a bit more about the history of digitization and the digital revolution of the 1990s, as I was too young and unaware to read books like this at the time or to fully grasp what was happening around me.
True Rating: 2.8 Stars
Notes/Quotes/Bits:
Page 4: "The change from atoms [eg books and CDs] to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable."
Page 8: The novel versus multi-media content -- novels demand imagination, multi-media frequently does the work for you...
Page 24: Wireless bandwidth is limited and we only have so many signal ranges, unlike wired communications
Page 25: Phone lines from phone companies didn't lose power due to their being made with copper wire, which can carry power.
Page 29: Good point and analogy about beginners with camcorders: they zoom and pan and try out all the features and make crappy videos, just like other people do with other things when they're starting out and before they learn to use moderation and subtlety.
Page 94: Negroponte predicts and demands SIRI
Pages 112-113: Pan-and-Scan explained
Pages 117-118: Apparently Virtual Reality was invented in 1968 and caught on in the 1990s (I remember using one in Disney World as an adolescent)
Page 134: Cool use for force-feedback:
"I was involved in building an early prototype of a machine that pushed back at you, a force-feedback device in which the effort required to move it could be a function of anything you wanted. Under computer control, it could change from moving freely to feeling as if it were being pushed through molasses. In one application, we had a map of Massachusetts with a demographic database. The user could plot plans for a new highway by moving this force-feedback digitizer. However, the amount of force needed to push it varied as a function of the number of families that would be displaced. In fact, you could close your eyes and plot out very literally the path of least resistance to a new highway."
Page 135: Negroponte is very big on eye-movement-tracking and speech recognition
Page 148: He incorrectly predicts that voice would be the main computer/electronics interface in 2015.
Page 184: Faxes use ones and zeroes to indicated where there is and isn't ink on a page
-- faxes were invented by the Japanese to send Kanji back and forth, because they couldn't be read by computers at the time. The author hates fax machines.
Page 206: The author went to boarding school in Switzerland and went on a massive country-wide chase with his army general headmaster and the Swiss army dropping clues from helicopters in the woods and crazy stuff like that.
October 2, 2011
(2.5) Only interesting as a historical document (but he is of course accurate)
I had to rate this according to its readability and relevance now. It's not much when you measure it on those terms, but it was certainly impressive how he could sense the trends in our digital lives. Things like DVRs, ubiquitous computing (with handheld or wearable computing devices), GPS and voice navigation in our cars, video-on-demand etc.
He did rail against fax and the US approach to HDTV which may have been particularly relevant in 1994, but seem rather irrelevant now.
All that said, if Negroponte wrote the future of technology right now, I wouldn't think twice about picking it up and reading it! :)
I had to rate this according to its readability and relevance now. It's not much when you measure it on those terms, but it was certainly impressive how he could sense the trends in our digital lives. Things like DVRs, ubiquitous computing (with handheld or wearable computing devices), GPS and voice navigation in our cars, video-on-demand etc.
He did rail against fax and the US approach to HDTV which may have been particularly relevant in 1994, but seem rather irrelevant now.
All that said, if Negroponte wrote the future of technology right now, I wouldn't think twice about picking it up and reading it! :)
August 24, 2025
We read a hundred and one child-rearing advice books, my wife and I did, back in 1995 when we were expecting our first kid: the seminal What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Terry Brazelton’s brilliant and groundbreaking Touchpoints, a well-worn copy of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care that had made the rounds with our older, child-bearing siblings, and many more. But while we were busy seeking the secrets to being perfect parents in the pages of these books, I didn’t realize I was already in possession of the one book I really needed to help my soon-to-be-son thrive in this world: Being Digital, by Nicholas Negroponte.
Re-reading Negroponte’s book now, 30 years after it was released (and just a few weeks before my son Evan turns 30), I realize that Being Digital told me everything I would need to know about the kind of world my son would be growing up in, and how to navigate it. It’s an extraordinarily prescient book, describing how the world back then was quickly transitioning from “atoms to bits,” and how everything would soon be digitized.
I remember being skeptical about some of Negroponte’s predictions: Who would want to read a digital book? Digital files will replace all my albums? No way.
But if you read the book today, it’s striking just how much Negroponte got right.
Negroponte was no Nostradumas-like psychic, though. He was the founder and director of the MIT Media Lab and a columnist for Wired Magazine, giving him access to many of the world’s most future-thinking people and cutting-edge technologies. And Negroponte was blessed with the storytelling skills to write a best-selling book that painted a vivid picture of the soon-to-be digitized world that we would live in.
I was 29 years-old when Being Digital was published, and at the time I was living large in an analog world: typing my grad school papers on an IBM Selectric typewriter while listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports on my dusty vinyl-turntable. I still hadn’t figured out how to set the clock on the VCR, and I was just starting to tinker with my IBM PS 1 personal computer and its 28.8 modem.
But this baby we were about to have, Negroponte told me, would live and learn and play and work in a world of bits, not atoms.
When Being Digital went to press, the book tells us, “35 percent of American families and 50 percent of American teenagers had a personal computer at home; 30 million people were estimated to be on the Internet; 65 percent of new computers sold worldwide in 1994 were for the home; and 90 percent of those sold in 1995 were expected to have modems or CD-ROMs.”
Imagine? CD-ROMs! Wow.
It’s easy to roll your eyes now, 30 years later, when you re-read this book. Because we take for granted that, back in the day, none of this stuff was obvious.
“I spend a minimum of three hours a day in front of a computer and have done so for many years,” Negroponte boasts. From today’s work-from-home-because-of-the-goddamn-global-pandemic perspective, he’s a slacker.
Here are a few nuggets from the 1995 book:
“Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time…if instead of going to work by driving my atoms into town, I log into my office and do my work electronically, exactly where is my workplace?” (Who wants to tell him?)
“The user community of the Internet will be in the mainstream of everyday life. Its demographics will look more and more like the demographics of the world itself…the true value of a network is less about information and more about community. The information superhighway is more than a shortcut to every book in the Library of Congress. It is creating a totally new, global social fabric.” (No way, your 1995-self says.)
“Bits co-mingle effortlessly. They start to get mixed up and can be used and reused together, or separately. The mixing of audio, video and data is called multimedia; it sounds complicated, but it is nothing more than co-mingled bits.” (Sounds exciting!)
The section entitled “Books Without Pages” describes the Kindle — 12 years before its’ debut. The concepts of Video on Demand, DVRs, iPods, iPhones, The Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Siri, Alexa — and their likely impact on the analog society I was raised in — were all explored and explained in Being Digital.
Looking back now, I wish I was more mindful of the insights Negroponte was passing on to me as a new dad. I know now, for a fact, that I was applying analog standards to my son’s approach to his increasingly-digital life. The way he studied, the way he read and consumed information, the games he played, were all so foreign to me as he grew from a toddler to a young man, even though I was still just in my thirties. And the acute friction we sometimes felt while arguing over homework and screen-time validates Negroponte’s central point when he wrote Being Digital: the world was changing fast, and my son was a digital native.
Despite having figured out my PS 1 and upgrading my modem to a blazing fast 56k, I was not a native. He and I were occupying two very different spaces.
By the time the stork brought our next two kids — Julia in 1998 and Ethan in 2002 — it felt like they had e-mail addresses before they left the hospital.
Google, founded in September, 1998, tells me today that Negroponte turns 82 this coming December. So, happy early-birthday to him. And happy birthday to Being Digital and to my son Evan, who both turn 30 this year.
I highly recommend you read the book to get a sense of perspective on just how far we’ve come.
Re-reading Negroponte’s book now, 30 years after it was released (and just a few weeks before my son Evan turns 30), I realize that Being Digital told me everything I would need to know about the kind of world my son would be growing up in, and how to navigate it. It’s an extraordinarily prescient book, describing how the world back then was quickly transitioning from “atoms to bits,” and how everything would soon be digitized.
I remember being skeptical about some of Negroponte’s predictions: Who would want to read a digital book? Digital files will replace all my albums? No way.
But if you read the book today, it’s striking just how much Negroponte got right.
Negroponte was no Nostradumas-like psychic, though. He was the founder and director of the MIT Media Lab and a columnist for Wired Magazine, giving him access to many of the world’s most future-thinking people and cutting-edge technologies. And Negroponte was blessed with the storytelling skills to write a best-selling book that painted a vivid picture of the soon-to-be digitized world that we would live in.
I was 29 years-old when Being Digital was published, and at the time I was living large in an analog world: typing my grad school papers on an IBM Selectric typewriter while listening to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports on my dusty vinyl-turntable. I still hadn’t figured out how to set the clock on the VCR, and I was just starting to tinker with my IBM PS 1 personal computer and its 28.8 modem.
But this baby we were about to have, Negroponte told me, would live and learn and play and work in a world of bits, not atoms.
When Being Digital went to press, the book tells us, “35 percent of American families and 50 percent of American teenagers had a personal computer at home; 30 million people were estimated to be on the Internet; 65 percent of new computers sold worldwide in 1994 were for the home; and 90 percent of those sold in 1995 were expected to have modems or CD-ROMs.”
Imagine? CD-ROMs! Wow.
It’s easy to roll your eyes now, 30 years later, when you re-read this book. Because we take for granted that, back in the day, none of this stuff was obvious.
“I spend a minimum of three hours a day in front of a computer and have done so for many years,” Negroponte boasts. From today’s work-from-home-because-of-the-goddamn-global-pandemic perspective, he’s a slacker.
Here are a few nuggets from the 1995 book:
“Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time…if instead of going to work by driving my atoms into town, I log into my office and do my work electronically, exactly where is my workplace?” (Who wants to tell him?)
“The user community of the Internet will be in the mainstream of everyday life. Its demographics will look more and more like the demographics of the world itself…the true value of a network is less about information and more about community. The information superhighway is more than a shortcut to every book in the Library of Congress. It is creating a totally new, global social fabric.” (No way, your 1995-self says.)
“Bits co-mingle effortlessly. They start to get mixed up and can be used and reused together, or separately. The mixing of audio, video and data is called multimedia; it sounds complicated, but it is nothing more than co-mingled bits.” (Sounds exciting!)
The section entitled “Books Without Pages” describes the Kindle — 12 years before its’ debut. The concepts of Video on Demand, DVRs, iPods, iPhones, The Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Siri, Alexa — and their likely impact on the analog society I was raised in — were all explored and explained in Being Digital.
Looking back now, I wish I was more mindful of the insights Negroponte was passing on to me as a new dad. I know now, for a fact, that I was applying analog standards to my son’s approach to his increasingly-digital life. The way he studied, the way he read and consumed information, the games he played, were all so foreign to me as he grew from a toddler to a young man, even though I was still just in my thirties. And the acute friction we sometimes felt while arguing over homework and screen-time validates Negroponte’s central point when he wrote Being Digital: the world was changing fast, and my son was a digital native.
Despite having figured out my PS 1 and upgrading my modem to a blazing fast 56k, I was not a native. He and I were occupying two very different spaces.
By the time the stork brought our next two kids — Julia in 1998 and Ethan in 2002 — it felt like they had e-mail addresses before they left the hospital.
Google, founded in September, 1998, tells me today that Negroponte turns 82 this coming December. So, happy early-birthday to him. And happy birthday to Being Digital and to my son Evan, who both turn 30 this year.
I highly recommend you read the book to get a sense of perspective on just how far we’ve come.
August 21, 2012
No es lo que sucede, sino por qué sucede. De esa manera entendemos algo mejor la digitalización del mundo actual. El libro tiene años, y asusta bastante ver cómo la mayoría de sus predicciones se han ido cumpliendo, pero aún así merece la pena, porque las ideas básicas, los por qués, siguen siendo los mismos y sigue mereciendo la pena entenderlos.
July 3, 2007
fantastic overview - this guy has amazing insight. a good textbook for any students doing a communication degree
July 16, 2014
It's always entertaining to read predictions of the future, but I don't put a lot of stock in it.
January 29, 2019
Dated, I should have read it in the last century.
Surveys computers, internet, and much more. Predictions have come true or been exceeded
well written
Surveys computers, internet, and much more. Predictions have come true or been exceeded
well written
October 19, 2025
A disappointing read. Negroponte's (admittedly entertaining) essays drip with sycophantic techno-optimism, rarely considering the negatives of "being digital" - and even when doing so, immediately hand-waving problems away with undying faith that digital technologies are fated to solve all our problems.
In fairness, there is no doubt that many of Negroponte's predictions have rang true in the 30 years since this book's atoms hit shelves. His insistence on decentralized networks has been realized in the form of IoT. The personalized media feeds he describes are dime-a-dozen in today's social media algorithms. Most of all, his vision of the internet as a world-changing phenomena was so accurate that it has become hard to believe anyone ever believed the contrary. Yet his technological fortune telling is greatly overshadowed by the cavernous holes left when he fails to consider any of the negative repercussions.
Negroponte's visions of the future reek of tone deaf privilege. It is no wonder that a descendent of genuine aristocracy dreams most of digital butlers. At every corner he is foaming at the mouth imaging a world where your technology knows "where [your] mother-in-law lives, whom [you] had dinner with last night, and what time [your] flight departs". One would think the director of the MIT Media Lab would have foreseen the issues in collecting the sheer amounts of human behavioral data required for his fantasies to come true, but no. Negroponte almost entirely neglects to address the problem of Big Data and digital surveillance. When he does (in the post-script), he is only concerned with surveillance and censorship by the government, never questioning whether we should actually want corporations to collect all our sensitive data, or the disastrous consequences of this surrender.
When describing the future of work, Negroponte confidently espouses that the "crisp line between love and duty will blur," predicting the increasingly ubiquitous expectation that 9-5 is a loose suggestion. But it's alright! He doesn't "begrudge people the right to distance themselves from their work," as if they will have any choice when the distinct between work and personal time "starts to evaporate". We have not become "Sunday painters"; we have become Saturday workers.
I recognize that the mid-90s were a time of great hope, especially for those in Negroponte's class, but his blatant refusal to engage with any legitimate criticisms of his deterministic optimism reads as naive and uninformed at best, and willfully ignorant at worst.
In fairness, there is no doubt that many of Negroponte's predictions have rang true in the 30 years since this book's atoms hit shelves. His insistence on decentralized networks has been realized in the form of IoT. The personalized media feeds he describes are dime-a-dozen in today's social media algorithms. Most of all, his vision of the internet as a world-changing phenomena was so accurate that it has become hard to believe anyone ever believed the contrary. Yet his technological fortune telling is greatly overshadowed by the cavernous holes left when he fails to consider any of the negative repercussions.
Negroponte's visions of the future reek of tone deaf privilege. It is no wonder that a descendent of genuine aristocracy dreams most of digital butlers. At every corner he is foaming at the mouth imaging a world where your technology knows "where [your] mother-in-law lives, whom [you] had dinner with last night, and what time [your] flight departs". One would think the director of the MIT Media Lab would have foreseen the issues in collecting the sheer amounts of human behavioral data required for his fantasies to come true, but no. Negroponte almost entirely neglects to address the problem of Big Data and digital surveillance. When he does (in the post-script), he is only concerned with surveillance and censorship by the government, never questioning whether we should actually want corporations to collect all our sensitive data, or the disastrous consequences of this surrender.
When describing the future of work, Negroponte confidently espouses that the "crisp line between love and duty will blur," predicting the increasingly ubiquitous expectation that 9-5 is a loose suggestion. But it's alright! He doesn't "begrudge people the right to distance themselves from their work," as if they will have any choice when the distinct between work and personal time "starts to evaporate". We have not become "Sunday painters"; we have become Saturday workers.
I recognize that the mid-90s were a time of great hope, especially for those in Negroponte's class, but his blatant refusal to engage with any legitimate criticisms of his deterministic optimism reads as naive and uninformed at best, and willfully ignorant at worst.
October 22, 2022
Un excelente resumen de lo que considero un documental histórico contemporáneo de la informática del siglo XX, me pase leyendo el libro y era como volver a mis años de la universidad cuando observaba la evolución de de la era digital, yo les comento que cuando estaba estudiando, lo más avanzado que había era los faxes, ese fenómeno de poder enviar una carta por medio del hilo telefónico, luego vi cuando inicio la era del celular, me recuerdo que cuando compre mi primer celular ya en la era del GSM y envié un mensaje de texto a un amigo era como estar soñando, Ni hablar del internet cuando el mejor motor de búsqueda era Yahoo luego apareció Google y lo demás es historia.
En mi primer trabajo saber de redes y de Windows eras un guru, ahora se debe saber de tantas cosas que es más lo que hacen las equipos que lo que uno realmente hace.
Yo le recomendaría este libro a todos los que tienen curiosidad por este fascinante mundo de los bits, a los estudiantes de todo lo relacionado a la informática.
En mi primer trabajo saber de redes y de Windows eras un guru, ahora se debe saber de tantas cosas que es más lo que hacen las equipos que lo que uno realmente hace.
Yo le recomendaría este libro a todos los que tienen curiosidad por este fascinante mundo de los bits, a los estudiantes de todo lo relacionado a la informática.
August 15, 2023
I want to say reading this book was extremely interesting. I am a current computer engineering masters student. I mention this because this book was an interesting look at what one person thought the future of technology to be in 1995. I find it interesting because that is the history of my field, predictions about my field. Some came true and others either did not or have not yet. Knowing my field, things are always changing so there is no true way to say whether some of the predictions will come true or not. Moving on, I really enjoyed this book, so why 4 stars and not 5. There is something to be said about the book being obsolete. It mentions this on the back cover. Additionally, I read this for pleasure, but do not think it would be a pleasure read for most people. I loved it, but it didn't suck me in, so 4 stars. Excellent job with the book though.
February 25, 2019
Negroponte is a visionary, no doubt. But his ramblings are way too general and fall into the same pit like when you read science fiction after 50 years. They imagine something that might even be on the spot, but they don't have the words to describe and no idea of even the first details of implementation. So basically you get stories of the future in the style of a great drunken pubtalk. Or maybe in a fantasy epic or a cult you'd call them "a prophecy". I hope at least somebody has gotten a glimmer of an inspiration from this collection, although this collection might be rather outdated now after 2019 when I read it. But it's worth at least a quick listen.
Also this is my first audiobook narrated by a magician! Woohoo for Penn Jillette!
Also this is my first audiobook narrated by a magician! Woohoo for Penn Jillette!
March 15, 2018
I was a volunteer for OLPC (one of his projects that came out of the MIT Media lab in 2007) and saw some of vision in that project and people like Walter Bender (who is mentioned in the book). He is a visionary person for things he worked on and saw. The book is from the 90s, when the internet was just starting to be popular. It shows vision in so many areas and is plain spoken as to make it accessible to average people. Even now you can see things he imagined unfolding like the Amazon Alexa, which enables people to 'do something' rather than work on a computer, keyboard and mouse, by using a hands-free technological agents.
April 17, 2020
3 1/2 stars. Twenty-five years ago this book looked ahead at what our digital world would be like. It’s interesting to read it now to see how much Negroponte got right and how little he got wrong. For example, he was correct about the death of video rental stores, but wrong about the proliferation of holograms. Some of the material still seems timely, like getting our household appliances to talk to each other. A few things are so out of date now that we barely remember them - yes, email truly has replaced faxes. If I had read this book 10 or 20 years ago I probably would have given it 4 stars.
May 19, 2025
“…small members of the digital world, that aren’t electrical…holograms running across your desk”
“Late at night on July 3rd 1976, the Israelis launched an extraordinarily successful strike on the Entebbe Uganda airport rescuing 103 hostages. What the Israelis had done was build in the dessert a physical model scale of the Entebbe airport. The commando’s then practiced assaults on this mock-up. By the time they arrived in Uganda for the real thing, they had extraordinarily keen sense of the place. What a simple and terrific idea.”
“Instead of carrying your laptop, wear it” 😶
“The idea of making all food RADIOACTIVE”
“Late at night on July 3rd 1976, the Israelis launched an extraordinarily successful strike on the Entebbe Uganda airport rescuing 103 hostages. What the Israelis had done was build in the dessert a physical model scale of the Entebbe airport. The commando’s then practiced assaults on this mock-up. By the time they arrived in Uganda for the real thing, they had extraordinarily keen sense of the place. What a simple and terrific idea.”
“Instead of carrying your laptop, wear it” 😶
“The idea of making all food RADIOACTIVE”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 19, 2017
To a book written in 1995, it's incredible actual considering the fact that on technology, things grow older very fast. It's amazing to see how the author was able to foresee the big changes that we are experiencing right now on many of the social aspects that the digital technology has touched. That been said, the book starts to show it's age since many of things that he sees as future, are right now a reality, like digital newspapers, GPS and autonomous self-driving car.
January 2, 2022
Outdated but interesting as a brief historical marker. Interesting to see these concepts develop in real time, for better or for worse. I felt like I could pick up on the author’s blind spots especially when there is a general unawareness of the effects on unrepresented people. I definitely benefit from reading in the present however there are digital feminist texts etc that were written before that are a lot more interesting and hold up over time.
May 4, 2024
I read this because another author I respect listed it as an important book. Honestly, I don’t know why. It is so outdated, most of what he talks about being in the future is already happening. I am not sure what a book like this does to benefit my life. I can imagine there may be a world where you want computer science majors to read books like this to inspire creative projects, but it really isn’t broadly applicable.
August 15, 2023
I like that this was a short book with the info packed in without a lot of filler - plenty of authors seem to add in fluff to please publishers with a longer book. However, this was written decades ago and while interesting to see what predictions came true (quite a lot, actually), it would've been a lot more meaningful to read when it came out... not sure how I got recommended this book.
January 20, 2025
Dated but more importantly, not well written
A rambling diatribe full of expressions that were too personal, many of them requiring 2-3 reads before they started to make sense.
I've had this book on my to read list for a few years and was quite disappointed. It felt like a waste of time.
I learned nothing.
A rambling diatribe full of expressions that were too personal, many of them requiring 2-3 reads before they started to make sense.
I've had this book on my to read list for a few years and was quite disappointed. It felt like a waste of time.
I learned nothing.
May 28, 2019
He ain’t lying!
Written over 20 years ago, it’s amazing how he accurately predicted the ways multi- media would change commerce. It’s almost like our current entrepreneurs read this book for ideas. Amazing!!
Written over 20 years ago, it’s amazing how he accurately predicted the ways multi- media would change commerce. It’s almost like our current entrepreneurs read this book for ideas. Amazing!!
April 15, 2020
Being digital is a portrayal of the present and future of the digital world as we are experiencing more than two decades later than Nicholas' predictions. It beautifully covers a wide spectrum of topics with novel insights filled in each chapter.
Read
July 12, 2024Really only bought the hardcover because it looked pretty! Super out of date information in it so I wasn't really anticipating reading it. I got the audiobook (which really is only about an hour of information) and I feel like that was a nice enough overview of the basic topics
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