Being Digital

BEING DIGITAL BEING DIGITAL Nicholas Negroponte Hodder & Stoughton Copyright © Nicholas Negroponte 1995 The right of Nicholas Negroponte to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Hodder and Stoughton A division of Hodder Headline PLC Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 0 340 64525 3 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent Hodder and Stoughton A division of Hodder Headline PLC 338 Euston Road London NW1 3BH To Elaine who has put up with my being digital for exactly 11111 years CONTENTS Introduction: The Paradox of a Book 3 Part One: Bits Are Bits 1: The DNA of Information 11 2: Debunking Bandwidth 21 3: Bitcasting 37 4: The Bit Police 51 5: Commingled Bits 62 6: The Bit Business 75 Part Two: Interface 7: Where People and Bits Meet 89 8: Graphical Persona 103 9: 20/20 VR 116 VII 10: Looking and Feeling 127 11: Can We Talk About This? 137 12: Less Is More 149 Part Three: Digital Life 13: The Post Information Age 163 14: Prime Time Is My Time 172 15: Good Connections 184 16: Hard Fun 196 17: Digital Fables and Foibles 206 18: The New E-xpressionists 219 Epilogue: An Age of Optimism 227 Acknowledgments 233 Index 237 VIII being digital INTRODUCTION: THE PARADOX OF A BOOK eing dyslexic, 1 don11 like to read. As a child I read train timetables instead of the classics, and delighted in making imaginary perfect connections from one obscure town in Europe to another. This fascination gave me an excel- lent grasp oBf European geography Thirty years later, as director of the MIT Media Lab, I found myself in the middle of a heated national debate about the transfer of technology from U.S. research universities to foreign companies. I was soon summoned to two industry-government meetings, one in Florida and one in California. At both meetings, Evian water was served in one-liter glass bottles. Unlike most of the participants, I knew exactly where Evian was from my timetables. Evian, France, is more than five hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Those heavy glass bot- ties had to traverse almost one-third of Europe, cross the At- lantic, and, in the case of California, travel an additional three thousand miles. So here we were discussing the protection of the American computer industry and our electronic competitiveness, when we seemingly could not even provide American water at an American conference. Today, I see my Evian story not so much being about French mineral water versus American, but illustrating the fundamen- tal difference between atoms and bits. World trade has tradi- tionally consisted of exchanging atoms. In the case of Evian water, we were shipping a large, heavy, and inert mass, slowly, painfully, and expensively, across thousands of miles, over a pe- riod of many days. When you go through customs you declare your atoms, not your bits. Even digitally recorded music is dis- tributed on plastic CDs, with huge packaging, shipping, and in- ventory costs. This is changing rapidly The methodical movement of recorded music as pieces of plastic, like the slow human han- dling of most information in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, and videocassettes, is about to become the instan- taneous and inexpensive transfer of electronic data that move at the speed of light. In this form, the information can become universally accessible. Thomas Jefferson advanced the concept of libraries and the right to check out a book free of charge. But this great forefather never considered the likelihood that 20 million people might access a digital library electronically and withdraw its contents at no cost. The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstop- pable. Β Ε I Ν 6 Why now? Because the change is also exponential—small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking conse- quences tomorrow Did you ever know the childhood conundrum of working for a penny a day for a month, but doubling your salary each day? If you started this wonderful pay scheme on New Year's Day, you would be earning more than $10 million per day on the last day of January This is the part most people remember. What we do not realize is that, using the same scheme, we would earn only about $1.3 million if January were three days shorter (i.e., February). Put another way, your cumulative in- come for that whole month of February would be roughly $2.6 million, instead of the $21 million you earned in total during January. When an effect is exponential, those last three days mean a lot! We are approaching those last three days in the spread of computing and digital telecommunications. In the same exponential fashion, computers are moving into our daily lives: 35 percent of American families and 50 percent of American teenagers have a personal computer at home; 30 million people are estimated to be on the Internet; 65 percent of new computers sold worldwide in 1994 were for the home; and 90 percent of those to be sold this year are expected to have modems or CD-ROM drives. These numbers do not even include the fifty microprocessors in the average 1995 au- tomobile, or the microprocessors in your toaster, thermostat, answering machine, CD player, and greeting cards. And if I am wrong about any of the numbers above, just wait a minute. And the rate at which these numbers are growing is astonish- ing. The use of one computer program, a browser for the Internet called Mosaic, grew 11 percent per week between February and 49 DIGITAL December 1993. The population of the Internet itself is now in- creasing at 10 percent per month. If this rate of growth were to continue (quite impossibly), the total number of Internet users would exceed the population of the world by 2003. Some people worry about the social divide between the information-rich and the information-poor, the haves and the have-nots, the First and the Third Worlds. But the real cultural divide is going to be generational. When I meet an adult who tells me he has discovered CD-ROM, I can guess that he has a child between five and ten years old. When I meet someone who tells me she has discovered America Online, there is probably a teenager in her house. One is an electronic book, the other a so- cializing medium. Both are being taken for granted by children the same way adults don't think about air (until it is missing). Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. The giant central computer, the so-called mainframe, has been almost universally replaced by personal computers. We have seen computers move out of giant air-conditioned rooms into closets, then onto desktops, and now into our laps and pockets. But this is not the end. Early in the next millennium your right and left cuff links or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more computer power than your present PC. Your telephone won't ring indiscriminately; it will receive, sort, and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well-trained English butler. Mass media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and enter- tainment. Schools will change to become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialize with other children all over the world. The digital planet will look and feel like the head of a pin. Β Ε I Ν 6 As we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a nation- state will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities. We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a dif- ferent role. Twenty years from now, when you look out a window, what you see may be five thousand miles and six time zones away. When you watch an hour of television, it may have been delivered to your home in less than a second. Reading about Patagonia can include the sensory experience of going there. A book by William Buckley can be a conversation with him. So why an old-fashioned book, Negroponte, especially one without a single illustration? Why is Hodder and Stoughton shipping Being Digital as atoms instead of bits, when these pages, unlike Evian water, can be so easily rendered into digital form, from whence they came? There are three reasons. First, there are just not enough digital media in the hands of executives, politicians, parents, and all those who most need to understand this radically new culture. Even where computers are omnipresent, the current interface is primitive—clumsy at best, and hardly something with which you might wish to curl up in bed. A second reason is my monthly column in Wired magazine.

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