Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital

Negroponte sees mul mdia communication as more versatile, more direct, and more in hurlative than the written word. He also sees the electronic information processing system as being capable of make decisions and gathering and selecting data that will tell us what we expect to know without our having to wade through the mass of information open to get to the part we need.

The digital world exists in the computer and on the computer screen, but it also exists in the interface between different computers as information is gathered, arranged, and shared. Negroponte sees the digital in store(predicate) as one that is more rather than slight somebodyal. He cites the nerve of television, which today beams a program out to millions of quite a little because any further selectivity on the part of the signal is not possible. In the digital future, however, this need not be the case:

Instead of delivering a thousand television programs to everybody, it whitethorn be better to deliver one program to each person in one-thousandth of the real time. This will tot solelyy agitate how we think of broadcast media. The broadcast of most bits will stand absolutely nothing to do with the rate at which we work through them as humans (36).

Information in digital form is also more malleable. A photo or video in digital form can be manipulated, changed, and rerun by the end-user, and Negroponte sees this as freeing the individual to be more expressive and to shape information more to his or her ne

The consumer will censor by grave the receiver what bits to select. The Bit Police, out of habit, will want to engage the medium itself, which really makes no sense at all (55).

Much of our attention recently has been focused on the so-called Y2K problem, or the Year 2000 Problem, though in fact no one knows for certain if there will be a problem when we reach that year. The concern shows that Negroponte is right that computers are enough so pervasive that they pose a problem if we do not take care in their use.

The complexity of the engineering involved and the speed with which this applied science has become widespread may have intimidated legislators, who may feel that by the time they devise a law to cover a technology, that technology will be outdated and something newborn will be in its place. This has certainly been a problem in piece of music definitive legislation on an issue like copyright, since new technologies create new problems in this area. In terms of privacy, though, it is less important how the information is stored and transmitted than it is how it is used by the formation storing it. The concern expressed by the public is that information they pull to one organization be used as intend and not provided to another organization for a different purpose.

Negroponte introduces more concepts which have been much discussed in recent years, so the ratifier is likely to be familiar with most even if he or she heard them in a different context. The smorgasbord of fears expressed by Negroponte about what may happen in a digital world once our information is social by others has been of great concern for some time, though Negroponte sees the risk as much greater than anything that has come to pass to date. The computer revolution took place rapidly over the last cardinal years or so and is continuing today at an increasing pace. Computers are part of our lives in ways we a great deal do not even notice, not only in the more obvious personal computers we
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.