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, Nicholas Negroponte, Professor of Media Tech-nolory at MII is also Founding Director of theMedia l-ab.

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FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY I996

Coryight @ 1995 by Nicholos P N.gtoponte

All rights reserved under lntemational and Pan-American CopyrightConventions. Published in the Unired Srares by Vinuge Book,a division of Random Hous€, lnc., New York, and sirnultaneouslyin Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.Originally publGhed in hardcover in slightly differem formby Alfred A. IGopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

Ponioru of this work were onginally published in slightly difl€renrform in Mred rnagazine.

The Library of Congess has cataloged the lhopf edirion as follows:Negroponte, Nicholas.Being digirayNicholas Negropome.-lsr ed.pcmIncludes index.rsBN 0-679-.13919-6]. Digiral communications-Social asp€cts.

2. Technolo$/ and civilization.3. Computer networks-Social asp€cts.

4. lnter"active media-Social aspects. l. Title.TK5103.7.N43 1995

303.48'33--dc2094-45971 CtP

Vintage ISBN: 0-679-76290-6

Manufacrured in rhe United Stares of America898765432r

To Elainewho has put up with my being digital for exactly 1 I I I I years

GllTIEIITS

Introduction: The Paradox of a Book

Pan One: Bits Are Bits

1: The DNA of Information2: Debunking Bandwidth3: Bitcasting,1: The Bit Police5: Commingled Bits6: The Bit Business

Pan Tvo: Interface

7: Where People and Bits Meet8: Graphical Persona9:20l20VR

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10: looking and FeelingI l: Can We Talk About This?12: Less Is More

Pan Three: Dgital Ufe

13: The Post-lnformation Age14: Prime Time Is My Time15: Good Connections16: Hard Fun17: Digital Fables and Foibles18: The New E-xpressioniss

Epilogue: An Age of OptimismAfter WordsAcknowledgmentsIndex

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lllTR0DUCTl0llrTHT PARADOX OF A BOOI

eing dyslexic, I don't like to read. As a child Iread train timetables instead of the classics,and delighted in making imaginary perfectconnections from one obscure town in Europeto another. This fascination gave me an excel-

lent grasp of European geographyThirty years later, as director of the MIT Media t-ab, I found

myself in the middle of a heated national debate about thetransfer of technology from U.S. research universities to foreigncompanies. I was soon summoned to two industry-govemmentmeetings, one in Florida and one in Califomia.

At both meetings, Evian water was served in oneJiter glass

bortles. Unlike most of the panicipants, I knew exactly whereEvian was from my timetables. Evian, France, is more than fivehundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Those heary glass bot-

2D T B U 1I K I 1I G BA 1I D W I DTH

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I n the late I960s, when I was an assistant profes-

l ro, oi computer graphrcs. nobody knew whatI that was. Computers were totally outside every-

I aay tife. Today, I hear sixty-hve-year-old tycoonsI bo"rting ubout how many bytes of memory they

have in their Wizards or the capacity of their hard disks. Somepeople talk half-knowingly about the speed of their computerGhanks to the brilliant campaign of "Intel lnside") and affec-tionately (or not) about the flavor of their operating systems. Irecently met one socialite, a wealthy and charming woman,who knew so much about Microsoft's operating system that she

started a small business that provided consulting servrces forher "less-wired" peers. Her business card read, "I do Windows."

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I explain to you that we had dinner with Mr. X two nighi-before, at which time he explained that, contrary 16

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|rewas in fact

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even though people thought

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butwhat he really decided was

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etc. Namely, 100,000 bits(or so) later, I am abie to tell you what I communicated to mywife with l bit (I ask your forbearance with my assumption thata wink is 1 bit through the ether).

What is happening in this example is that the transmitter(me) and the receiver (Elaine) hold a common body of knowl-edge, and thus communication between us can be in short-hand. ln this example, I fire a certain bit through the ether andit expands in her head, triggering much more information.When you ask me what I said, I am forced to deliver to you all100,000 bits. I lose the 100,000-to-1 data compression.

There is a story of a couple who knew hundreds of dirryjokes so well that they would merely recite numbers to eachother. The few digits would call up an entire story and send oneor the other into uncontrollable laughter. More prosaic use o[this method in computer data compression is to number com-monly used long words and send those few bits, instead of theentire string of letters. We are likely to see more and more suchtechniques when we trade bandwidth against shared knowl-edge. The condensation of information not only saves on thecost of shipping bits but saves our time as well.

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Under today's methods of charging lor telephone calls, I wouldpay a hundred thousand tlmes more to send my story about

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he fact that, in one year, a then thiny-four-year-old former Michigan cheerleader generatedsales in excess of $1.2 billion did not go unno-ticed by Time Wamer, which sigred Madonnato a $60 million "multimedia" contracr in 1992.

At the time, I was stanled ro see mulnmedia used to describe a

collection of unrelated traditional print, record, and film pro-ductions. Since then, I see the word almost every day in theWall Street Joumal, often used as an adjective ro mean an)'rhingfrom interactive to digital to broadband. One headline read,"Record Shops Yield to Multimedia Stores." It would seem rharif you are an information and entenainment provider who does

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