Jillette Penn - Being Digital

Nicholas Negroponte, Professor of Media Technology at MIT, is also Founding Director of the Media Lab.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 1996

Copyright 1995 by Nicholas P. Negroponte

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

Portions of this work were originally published in slightly different form in Wired magazine.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Negroponte, Nicholas.
Being digital/Nicholas Negroponte.1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-679-43919-6
1. Digital communicationsSocial aspects.
2. Technology and civilization.
3. Computer networksSocial aspects.
4. Interactive mediaSocial aspects. I. Title.
TK5103.7.N43 1995
303.4833dc20
94-45971
Vintage ISBN 978-0-679-76290-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-91182-2

v3.1

To Elaine

who has put up with my being digital for exactly 11111 years

B eing dyslexic, I dont 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 excellent grasp of 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 bottles had to traverse almost one-third of Europe, cross the Atlantic, 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 fundamental difference between atoms and bits. World trade has traditionally 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 period of many days. When you go through customs you declare your atoms, not your bits. Even digitally recorded music is distributed on plastic CDs, with huge packaging, shipping, and inventory costs.

This is changing rapidly. The methodical movement of recorded music as pieces of plastic, like the slow human handling of most information in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, and videocassettes, is about to become the instantaneous 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 unstoppable.

Why now? Because the change is also exponentialsmall differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences 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 Years 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 income 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 automobile, 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 astonishing. The use of one computer program, a browser for the Internet called Mosaic, grew 11 percent per week between February and December 1993. The population of the Internet itself is now increasing 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 socializing medium. Both are being taken for granted by children the same way adults dont think about air (until it is missing).