Being Digital

Reading "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte, he of the MIT Media lab. Similar to "When Things Start to Think" by Neil Gershenfeld, also of the MIT Media lab.

I remember that in the 90s, at the birth of the internet era, it was generally assumed that the "information superhighway" was going to incorporate a lot of "rich" content". You'd have talking machines, holographs, interaction with the computer in new ways (speech? touch and feel? Virtual reality booths?). But 10 years after the big bang of the internet, it seems that the networking aspects of the net have become more significant than the ideal of delivering "rich content" to the consumer.

I'm also in the business of information, so I think I can say something about the nature of information and data. It's relatively easy to talk about how you want such information to be presented, but not so easy to actually process information in that way. You could have clients who think that it's very easy to "just show the data in a different way", but it could take hours and hours of programming time to manually change all that shit.

Since 10 years ago we've started to realise that the internet is very rich in data, but getting useful stuff out of the data is the hard part. You could have very rich operating environments, but the economics are such that a lot of work needs to be done in order to manifest data in these environments. Furthermore, these environments might well be walled communities or gardens where information is not easy to get in or out. I think that the majority of the users have grown to accept a relatively low production qualities in exchange for being able to access a high amount of content. We can have stuff in HTML, but I guess that's probably good enough for > 90% of what's on the web.

I think one other work that is like a "State of the Internet" work today is "Search" by John Batelle. I will be reading it and trying to understand how searching and networking, rather than the possibilities of multimedia, have come to dominate the uses of the net.

Technologists will probably have their own priorities, but I don't ever think that technologies ever exist for their own sake. All technologies reside within our socio-economic realities and you'll have to think how they interact, not just with people, but also societies, in order to understand what does or does not work.

Oh, when I read "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward, I found 1 US ambassador to Iraq who was remarkable in that he actually volunteered to go serve there. His name is John Negroponte. Turns out that John and Nicholas are brothers.