Being Digital

Nicholas Negroponte

ISBN 0-340-64930-5, copyright 1995, 249 pages paperback

21 May 2000

It says on the cover:
THE BESTSELLING ROAD MAP FOR SURVIVAL ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

Perhaps, this would be more appropriate:
a unique perspective and philosophy on the transition to the digital age

The author is the director of the Media Laboratory at MIT as well as a founder of Wired magazine. This book is a result of insight from his thirty-plus years of experience in computing.

What I find refreshing are his views of the paradigm shift. He explains terminology that we have taken for granted: bits, bandwidth, fiber optics, mouse, multimedia, etc. Such a ground-up approach reminds me of my electrical engineering courses. We had started with binary numbers and worked our way up to logic diagrams, circuits, CPUs and buses, and finally image processing. That was long ago. Technology has moved on by leaps and bounds.

Given the obvious advantages of digital over analog, why in the world am I still listening to analog radio?