Being Digital

Being Digital

Author: Nicholas Negroponte

Publisher: Vintage Books

Pages: 240

Dedication: To Elaine, who has put up with my being digital for exactly 11111 years.

About the author: Negroponte, Professor of Media Technology at MIT is also founding director of the Media Lab.

Synopsis:

Today, fiber is cheaper than copper, including the cost of electronics at both ends. The only real advantage of copper is the ability to deliver power.

Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC) was a poet of classical Greece who was noted for his prodigious memory. When the roof of a banquet hall collapsed just after he had been called from the room, he found that he could identify the mangled remains of guests based on where they had been sitting: he inferred that tying material to specific spots in a mental spatial image would aid recall. He used this technique to remember his long speeches. He would associate parts of his oration with objects and places in a temple. Then while delivering his speech, he would revisit the temple in his mind to call forth his ideas in an orderly and comprehensive manner. The early Jesuits in China called this same process the building of “palaces of mind”.

When the Media Lab premiered its LEGO/Logo work in 1989, kids, kindergarten through sixth grade from the Hennigan School, demonstrated their projects before a full force of LEGO executives, academics and the press.

In October 1981, Seymour Papert and the author attended an OPEC meeting in Vienna. It was the one at which Sheikh Yamani delivered his famous speech about giving a poor man a fishing rod, not fish – teach him how to make a living, not take a handout. In a private meeting with Yamani, he asked the author if they knew the difference between a primitive and an uneducated person. The answer was simply that primitive people were not uneducated at all, they simply used different means to convey their knowledge from generation to generation, within a supportive and tightly knit social fabric. By contrast, an uneducated person is the product of a modern society whose fabric has unraveled and whose system is not supportive.