CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
May 1996, Vol. 38, No. 5
CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
May 1996, Vol. 38, No. 5
Being Digital
by Nicholas NegroponteBits, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Enterprising Librarian on a multi-volume mission to seek out the future of libraries, to read what non-librarians have to say about the Information Superhighway, and to boldly face predictions no traditional librarian wants to hear.
DIRECTOR'S LOG: LC Date 94-45971 CIP: The Enterprising Librarian is confronted by an alien presence known as Nicholas Negroponte. The alien claims to exist outside of three dimensional space, in a parallel universe comprised of bits, instead of atoms. He refers to this state of existence as Being Digital (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). Because bits can be moved faster and cheaper than atoms, he claims that the informational universe as-we-know-it is doomed.
As an example, he explains that, in our universe, book publishers must be in both the information delivery business and the manufacturing business. They are forced to move bits of information (content) as well as atoms of matter (the physical book). But this will change as user-friendly information appliances are universally deployed. Despite its light weight, ease of use, and high-contrast display, the printed book will eventually give way to the digital book. The digital book will be cheaper because it will not be printed, shipped, or stored as inventory in a three-dimensional warehouse. It will never go out of print, and it will be readily available at no cost from a digital library.
However, before the printed book is vaporized, atomized, and digitized, we must first face the annihilation of the videocassette industry! Desperate "vidiots" will no longer trek back and forth to Blockbuster (or their public library) in order to see their favorite stars. Instead, bits of entertainment will be delivered on demand to the information appliances and "smart TV's" of couch potatoes throughout the galaxy. The Negroponte Presence gives the video rental business less than ten years to live. A shocked colleague begs me to do something before it's too late. I helplessly reply, "Dammit Jim, I'm an administrator, not a media specialist! Besides, I never liked circulating videos anyway."
Now convinced that the Negroponte Presence had much to offer librarians, I decided to risk a dangerous mind meld. Slowly, painfully, our thoughts merged. Suddenly, I could differentiate atoms from bits. I understood the futility of moving atoms across vast distances without the aid of a transporter beam. I observed as a swirling nebula of commingled audio, video, and data bits transformed itself into a multimedia, virtual reality experience! I witnessed the birth of header bits, silent bits that index, map, and link other bits of data. I watched software programs called "interface agents" sift through the commingled bits, and pre-select for their human masters only the news, entertainment, and information that would be of interest to them.
I marveled as these agents tailored a daily "newspaper" completely to my interests, needs, and tastes. My information appliance was thoughtfully equipped with a political perspective knob that allowed me to vary the news coverage from far left to far right. I turned the knob as far left as it could go and scanned a George Will column that was quickly reduced to little more than a literate headline. Even Rush Limbaugh sounded affable! I wondered what the Montana edition looked like.
Something on the right side of Negroponte's brain caught my attention. It was "mediumlessness." In the digital world, the medium would no longer be the message. Instead, the medium would be one of several possible "embodiments" of the message. A weather report, for example, could be transmitted from its point of origin as a melange of commingled bits. An individual recipient, however, could shape-shift it into whatever media format he or she preferred: text, printed map, voice-only, video presentation, etc. If you had trouble understanding the weather report (or the hockey game or the performance of your warp drive) as it was presented in one medium, you could try it again in another medium. This made sense. Why should understanding be thwarted by the limitations of any one medium? What some of us learned from books, others learned from CPTV, Fox, or Howard Stern. Mediumlessness boiled down to the hope that messages, and people, would no longer be misunderstood.
Something severed the mind meld. The medium was not the message. The Negroponte Presence was absent. On my desk rested a book with a stark black and white cover, no illustrations, and no accompanying multimedia CD-ROM disc. Why would Negroponte leave me an old fashioned book? I searched through it and quickly found the answer.
... the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader's imagination and experiences...much of the color, sound and motion come from you ... the same kind of personal extension is needed to feel and understand what "being digital" might mean to your life.
Negroponte himself was conceding that books and reading still communicated some messages better than digital, interface agent-selected, interactive multimedia could, at least for now. I knew we had not seen the last of the Negroponte Presence, but other matters (and anti-matters) required my attention.
Close Director's Log.
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