Skip to main content

Play as Webslides

alistrecords 's List: N. Negroponte "Being Digital"

  • N. Negroponte: "Being Digital" , The Topology of a Shrinking Planet

    • Slowly but surely, bits will migrate to the proper channel at the proper time. If I want to see last year's Super Bowl, calling it up by telephone is the logical way to accomplish this (versus waiting for somebody to rebroadcast it). After the game, the Super Bowl is suddenly archival data and the suitable channel is very different from when it was "live."
    • Distance means less and less in the digital world. In fact, an Internet user is utterly oblivious to it. On the Internet, distance often seems to function in reverse. I frequently get faster replies from distant places than close ones because the time change allows people to answer while I sleep--so it feels closer.
    • 1 more annotations...

  • N. Negroponte: "Being Digital", Cottage Television, Chapter 14

    • If I were contemplating a visit to the southwestern coast of Turkey, I might not find a documentary on Bodrum, but I could find sections from movies about wooden-ship building, nighttime fishing, underwater antiquities, baba ghanouj, and Oriental carpets from such sources as National Geographic, PBS, the BBC, and hundreds of others. These pieces could be woven together to form a story that would suit my specific need. The result would not likely win an Oscar for best documentary, but that's not the point.

  • N. Negroponte: "Being Digital", Demanding on Demand

    • Broadcatching is the radiation of a bit stream, most likely one with vast amounts of information pushed into the ether or down a fiber. At the receiving end, a computer catches the bits, examines them, and discards all but the few it thinks you want to consume later.
    • Magazines, a notably asynchronous medium,
    • 3 more annotations...

  • N. Negroponte: "Being Digital", Place Without Space, Chapter 13

    • In the same ways that hypertext removes the limitations of the printed page, the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography.
    • many activities, like those of so-called knowledge workers, are not as dependent on time and place and will be decoupled from geography much sooner.

  • N. Negroponte: "Being Digital", Beyond Demographics

    • The transition from an industrial age to a post-industrial or information age has been discussed so much and for so long that we may not have noticed that we are passing into a post-information age.
    • The industrial age, very much an age of atoms, gave us the concept of mass production, with the economies that come from manufacturing with uniform and repetitious methods in any one given space and time.
    • 1 more annotations...

  • N. Negroponte:"Being Digital", Digital Persona

    • One of the reasons that talking cars have been unpopular is that they've had less personality than a seahorse.

      In general, our opinion of a computer's personality is derived from all the things it does badly. On occasion, the reverse may happen. One time I doubled over laughing when my spell-check program looked at my dyslexic-style typo aslo and proudly suggested that asshole was the correct spelling.

  • N. Negroponte: "Being Digital", Networks and Networks

    • Television networks and computer networks are almost the opposite of each other. A television network is a distribution hierarchy with a source (where the signal comes from) and many homogeneous sinks (where the signals go to).

      Computer networks, on the other hand, are a lattice of heterogeneous processors, any one of which can act both as source and sink. The two are so totally different from each other that their designers don't even speak the same language. The rationale of the one is about as logical to the other as Islamic fundamentalism is to an Italian Catholic.

    • The agent of change will be the Internet, both literally and as a model or metaphor. The Internet is interesting not only as a massive and pervasive global network but also as an example of something that has evolved with no apparent designer in charge, keeping its shape very much like the formation of a flock of ducks. Nobody is the boss, and all the pieces are so far scaling admirably.

  • N. Negroponte: "Being Digital", Being Asynchronous, Chapter 13

    • Being Asynchronous





      A face-to-face or telephone conversation is real time and synchronous. Telephone tag is a game played to find the opportunity to be synchronous.

    • We are forced into regular rhythms, not because we finished eating at 8:59 p.m., but because the TV program is about to start in one minute. Our great-grandchildren will understand our going to the theater at a given hour to benefit from the collective presence of human actors, but they will not understand the synchronous experiencing of television signals in the privacy of our home--until they look at the bizarre economic model behind it.
1 - 8 of 8
Showing 20▼ items per page
List Comments (0)

Sponsored Links

Ads by Google