Being Digital / Nicholas P. Negroponte

Introduction: The Paradox of a Book

• making imaginary perfect connections

• Data that move at the speed of light, the information can become universally accessible.

• The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable.

• a browser for the Internet called Mosaic

• Computing is not about computers any more.

• Computer graphics, human communications and interactive multimedia

 

 

Part One: Bits Are Bits

 

1.The DNA of Information

• A bit has no color, size, or weight, and it can travel at the speed of light. It is the smallest atomic element in the DNA of information. It is a state of being: on or off, true of false, up or down, in or out, black or white. - a bit to be a 1 or a 0.
• our binary vocabulary to include much more than just numbers, we have been able to digitize more and more types of information, like audio and video, rendering them into a similar reduction of 1s and 0s.
• 8 bits starring with 00000000 and ending with 11111111
• data compression and error correction - can save money - the economy of bits - stored & delivered - rendering a given type of data (voice, music, video)
• when all media is digital - because bits are bits
• First, bits commingle 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 - commingled bits
• Second, a new kind of bit is born.
• bits are not visible or audible.
• The kind of intelligence can live in two different places.
• the future will not be one or the other, but both.

 

 

 

 

2.Debunking Bandwidth

• Fiber is cheaper than copper.
• from the perspective of bits, the entire wired planet will eventually be fiber.
• unlimited band-width is hardly wrong or bad to have, but like free sex, it is not necessarily good either. Do we really want or need all those bits?
• Compressing 100,000 bits into 1 - wink : data compression
• we trade bandwidth against shared knowledge
• the real question in understanding the economics of bandwidth is, are some bits worth more than others? the answer is clearly yes.
• value varies in accordance with who is using them and how.
• the architecture of stars and loops is also driven by the nature of the content.

• it made all the sense in the world to have the Christmas-tree-light approach, a point-to-multipoint system.
• Eventually, most wiring will be stars. Loops will be deployed in very local areas or in the form of wireless broadcast, where the distribution medium by definition passes all homes at once. - under a lead unbrella
• thinking of bits like atoms leads to big pipes and little pipes.
• Water flows of doesn't flow.

 

 

 

 

3.Bitcasting

• HDTV -> Hi-Vision
  Japan used the Seoul summer Olympics in 1988 to launch Hi-Vision.
• Being digital is the license to grow.
• the digital world is intrinsically scalable.
• Set-top box -> out-boxed
• open systems is a vital concept.
• a truly open system is in the public domain and thoroughly available as a foundation on which everybody can build.
• TV becomes a totally different medium.
• the information superhighway

 

 

 

 

4.The Bit Police

• the flexibility is crucial.
• you decide that. the bits leave the station as bits to be used and transformed in a variety of different ways, personalized by a variety of different computer programs, and archived or not as you see fit.
• a signal is TV, radio, or data
• the bandwidth rich are getting bandwidth richer.
• the picture are digitized and frequently transmitted by wire as well.
• the entire conception and construction of the newspaper is digital, from beginning to end, until the very last step, when ink is squeezed onto dead trees. this is the step where bits becomes atoms.
• Copyright law is totally out of date. it is a Gutenberg artifact. since it is a reactive process, it will probably have to break down completely before it is corrected.
• most people worry about copyright in terms of the ease of making copies, in the digital world, not only the ease is at issue, but also the fact that the digital copy is as perfect as the original and, with some fancy computing, even better. in the same way that bit strings can be error-corrected, a copy can be cleaned up, enhanced, and have noise removed. the copy is perfect. this is well known to the music industry and has been the cause of delaying several consumer electronics products, notably DAT(digital audiotape). This may be senseless, because illegal duplication seems to be rampant even then the copies are less than perfect. In some countries, as many as 95 percent of all videocassettes sold are pirated.
• the melody for Happy Birthday is in the public domain, but if you want to use the lyrics in the scene of a movie, you must pay Warner/Chappell a royalty. Not very logical, but nonetheless part of a complex system of protecting music composers and performers.
• by contrast, the painting and resell it in smaller pieces, or to replicate it as a carpet or beach towel without the artist's permission.
• Clipping bits is very different from clipping atoms.
• it cost exactly zero pennies to do the above. nobody has a clear idea of who pays for what on the internet, but it appears to be free to most users.
• what happens when we transmit bits that are in a real sense formless, like the weather data referred to earlier??
• the real thing as can be imagined. surely, the real thing is not an expression of itself, but is itself.
• the body of data is not copyrightable.
• the medium is no longer the message.

 

 

 

 

5.Commingled Bits

• we are learning fast.
• we had to use bits, not atoms.
• in the digital world, information space is by no means limited to three dimensions. An expression of an idea or train of thought can include a multidimensional network of pointers to further elaborations or arguments, which can be invoked or ignored. the structure of the text should be imagined like a complex molecular model. Chunks of information can be reordered, sentences expanded, and words given definitions on the spot.
• hypermedia
• today, multimedia is a desktop or living room experience.
• same thing in different ways

 

 

 

6.The Bit Business

The entrepreneurial, business and regulatory landscape

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Two: Interface

 

 

 

7.Where people and Bits Meet

• in my opinion, there was a sub conscious effort to keep it mysterious, like the monopoly of the monks or some bizarre religious rite in the Dark Ages.
• the most effective interface design results from combining the forces of sensory richness and machine intelligence.

 

 

 

8.Graphical Persona

• Sketchpad was a real-time line drawing system that allowed the user to interact directly with the computer screen by means of a light pen.
• sketchpad was the big bang of computer graphics.
• to understand a person's graphical 'intent'
• learn about the sketching style of each user
• Apple Newton's ability to recognize handwriting by adapting to the user's penmanship
• a bit is the atomic element of information, a pixel is the molecular level of graphics.
• PIXEL, comes from the words picture and element.
• the real power of the pixel comes from its molecular nature, in that a pixel can be part of anything, from text to lines to photographs. pixel are pixel is as true as bits are bits. with enough pixels and with enough bits per pixel, you can achieve the excellent display quality of contemporary personal computers and workstations. However, the bad qualities, just as much as the good ones, result from the strictures of this basic grad structure.
• The Jaggies - 깨짐
• Have you ever wondered why you computer screen has jagged lines?
• Why do uppercase E, L and T look so good, yes S, W, and O look like badly made Christmas ornaments?
• the reason is that only one bit per pixel is being used to display the image, and the result is a staircase effect, or spatial aliasing, which is absolutely unnecessary if hardware and software manufacturers would just use more bits per pixel and throw a little computing power at the problem.
• SDMS spatial data management system
• in a room with a floor-to-ceiling, wall to wall, full color display, two auxiliary desktop displays; octophonic sound
• icons are common to the persona of all computers. people consider the imagery of trash cans, calculators, and telephone handsets as standard fare.
• Like riding bicycle; you don't even remember learning how to do it, you just do it.

 

 

 

9.20/20 VR

• VR can make the artificial as realistic as, and even more realistic than, the real.
• the idea behind VR is to deliver a sense of 'being there' by giving at least the eye what it would have received if it were there and more important, to have the image change instantly as you change your point of view.
• you feel you are the cause, not the effect.
• image quality - response time

 

 

 

10.Looking and Feeling

• it is time to make computers see and hear.
• Douglas Englebart, invented the mouse in 1964

 

 

 

11.Can We Talk About This?

• Speech is also more than words in that it has parallel sub-carriers of information.
• Spoken words carry a vast amount of information beyond the words themselves.
• Recognition and understanding are intimately intertwined.
• for the time being we are forced to solve problems of machine recognition without very much machine understanding.
• the problem of speech recognition has three variables: vocabulary size, degree of speaker independence, and word conncetedness.
• How many recognizable words are needed in the computer's memory at any one time?
• Today, our computation is more widely distributed and personalized. we can do more recognition at the periphery of the network.
• in order to stored speech to work at all, you have to have recorded it previously.
• each language is different and varies in its difficulty to synthesize.
• what is certain is that voice will be your primary channel of communication between you and your interface agents.

 

 

 

12.Less is More

• It is shared knowledge and the practice of using it in your best interests.
• Digital butlers will be numerous, living both in the network and by your side, both in the center and at the periphery of your own organizaion (large or small).
• comfortable with the idea that machines will be intelligent
• Alan Turing is generally considered the first person to seriously propose machine intelligence in his 1950 paper, Computer Machinery and Intelligence
• Later Pioneers, such as Marvin Minsky, continued Turing's deep interest in pure AI.
• Interface agentry will become decentralized in the same way as information and organization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Three: Digital Life

 

 

 

13.The Post-Information Age

• given space and time - with less regard for space and time
• place without space
• digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible.
• in the post information age, since you may live and work at one or many locations, the concept of an address now takes on new meaning.
• on-demand information will dominate digital life. we will ask explicitly and implicitly for what we want. this will require a radical rethinking of advertiser-supported programming.

 

 

 

14.Prime Time Is My Time

• Anything, anytime, anywhere - like a poem for modern mobility
  Nothing, never, nowhere

 

 

 

15.Good Connections

• facsimile machine generate a fine line by line map with 1s and 0s representing the black and white of ink and no ink.
• it is not letters and words; it is pixels.
• by looking for the structure in signals, how they were generated, we go beyond the surface appearance of bits and discover the building blocks out of which the image, sound, or text came. this is one of the most important facts of digital life.
• Fax is a Japanese legacy. their business - face to face- fax have legal value with signatures.
• CC - Carbon Copy

 

 

 

16.Hard Fun

• the joy of learning
• South Korea for shoving many fact into young minds is often to have students more or less dead on arrival when they enter the university system. over the next four years they feel like marathon runners being asked to go rock climbing at the finish line.
• Teaching Children Thinking
• since computer simulation just about anything is now possible, one need not learn about a frog by dissecting it. instead, children can be asked to design frogs, to build an animal with frog-like behavior, to modify that behavior, to simulate the muscles, to play with the frog.
• by playing with information, especially abstract subjects, the material assumes more meaning.
• current work with LEGOs includes a computer in a brick prototype, which demonstrates a further degree of flexibility and opportunity for Papert's constructivism and interbrick communication and opportunities to explore parallel processing in new ways.
• Kids using LEGO today will learn physical and logical principles you and I learned in college.
• abstract reasoning. the internet provides a new medium for reaching out to find knowledge and meaning.
• Most adult fail to see how children learn with electronic games.
• there is no question that many electronic games teach kids strategies and demand planning skills that they will use later in life.
• all that changes is the speed.
• Hard fun.

 

 

 

17.Digital Fables and Foibles

• Being digital changes the character of the standards for machine to machine communications.
• being lost - out of print
• active labels are an important part of the future.
• it can get lost, but you will know where it is.
• people already wear active badges for security purposes.
• Smart ready is a combination of prewiring and ubiquitous connectors for signal sharing among appliances.

 

 

 

18.The New E-xpressionists

• Tomorrow, people of all ages will find a more harmonious continuum in their lives, because increasingly the tools to work with and the toys to play with will be the same.
• e-xpressionsts
• can be the fantasy and ecstacy of one mind, it can be collective imagination of many, of it can be the vision of a revolutionary group.

 

 

 

Epilogue: An Age of Optimism

 

• white collar workplace to the same degree that it has already transformed the factory floor. the notion of lifetime employment at one job has already started to disappear.
• less with atoms and more with bits
• 4 very powerful qualities

decentralizing
globalizing
harmonizing
empowering

 

• the very same kind of massively parallel architectures have suddenly become possible by threading together low-cost, mass-produced personal computers.
• in the digital world, previously impossible solutions become viable.
• today when 20 percent of the world consumes 80 percent of its resources.
• the empowering nature of being digital, The access, the mobility, and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so different from the present.
• will become more digital than the preceding one.