Overview

This is intended to be read as a futurist look ahead of the future. Negroponte gets many things wrong, but a few of his predictions have been realized remarkably: the popularity of email, emergence of netiquette, and self-published video.

Negroponte’s focus is on individual users, but does not really acknowledge other units of social organization. He seems to dislike demographics, and want to get rid of classifications that are more general than the individual. He strips culture down to the individual level, but disregards the prevalent strength of other emergent social structures. If there is no society (just users and technology), then there is nothing in the way of technology.

The book works in a perfect opposition to Duguid and Brown, who claim that social structures are resolute and hard to budge. They argue, accurately, that technology that does not account for society will fail. Their failure is to suggest that society will not change at all.

Assorted Notes:

Things are changing from atoms to bits. Things might read as important things, or the important parts of things are being understood in terms of bits instead of atoms, as information rather than matter.

A lot of this is brought about (or at least reflected by) the change and rapid growth and saturation of the world and everyday life with microprocessors. The change strikes Negroponte as inevitable, and having the potential to drastically change things. In the introduction, the argument seems to lovingly reflect a sort of futurism of the infinitely possible. Especially, Negroponte sees cultural systems as being drastically changed by digital communication.

The intense anti-futurist focus given by Duguid and Brown make some sense while compared here.

Chapter 13

Post information age: Evidently (during 1995, when this was written) we were passing into a post-information age. This seems hard to swallow. The internet, the chief vehicle of the information age had barely spread its wings by then.

In terms of post-information, what seems to be understood as this relates to consumer culture is an idea of individual knowability. That individuals are composed of information (notably as opposed to statistical rows, this has a more declarative model). Negroponte describes machines being able to understand people with a significant degree of subtlety.

Granted, some of this has been realized: notably in terms of advertising and search technologies, but even still the amount by which distributed software systems know their users is minute, and far from Negroponte’s examples of the helpful liquor store agent. (p. 165) Negroponte’s point is that “All of these are based on a model of you as an individual, not as part of a group who might buy a certain brand of soapsuds or toothpaste.” The problem is that is nearly EXACTLY what the new models do! They are based not on committee decided consumer models, but on statistical and correlational ones. Their only virtue is their emergent nature, but they are just as demeaning and reductive as any other.

Furthermore, these examples seem extremely invasive of privacy. For every bit of helpfulness that a system might generate, there is ten times that in the potential for abuse and exploitation. Negroponte claims that “advertising will be so personalized that it is indistinguishable from news. It is news.” (p. 170) This is a terrifying prospect, since an advertiser is always investing in potential return, which by nature, is not in the consumer’s best interest.

Chapter 14

Media consumption is leaning towards a pay per view model of content. This does make sense and is consistent with contemporary models.

The abundance of meta information is also forecasted here, which plays out as well. Negroponte’s preoccupation with television seems to foreshadow phenomena such as YouTube.

Chapter 15

On interpretation via decoding (looking at decoding a page as a “fax”). Sounds like it could reference classical information theory.

Describes MIDI as a potential replacement format for storing music effectively. Essentially, Negroponte is trying to make the distinction between underlying structural information and rendered “image” information. Taken to the extreme, a musical recording is nothing more than the score or a midi file.

This misses the huge stumbling stone that midi is horrible. And the matter of representation via schematic is prone towards variability in representation, rendering power, consistency, and many more difficulties. What is troubling about this argument is not that it claims that schematic transformation is possible, even if lossy, but that it claims that the image is nothing more than a rendered schematic.

Modern compression (or even a relatively old format such as mp3) has a significant compression power, but its approach is totally different.

Negroponte evidently really doesn’t like fax. Then again, who can blame him? And yes, email is really so awesome, and will be once users learn decorum. This makes sense and has happened. It’s hard to understand what is being argued, though.

Chapter 16

Negroponte looks at kids doing things with Lego/Logo systems as a way for reaching children with varying learning styles. This references the evocative capacities of computers discussed by Turkle. He strongly references Papert on this issue. Notably, computers enable a learning by doing as opposed to a learning by drill and practice.

Via representational power, computers can provide context in learning.

Example of the wild goose chase separates “street smarts” from “classroom skills”. The internet enables an abundance of information available for children to learn and assemble. An odd critique of this is (again) the matter of abuse and safety. While the internet may enable a sort of collective intelligence, Negroponte assumes that all content will necessarily be positive and complimentary.

Concluding he discusses Sheik Yamani and learning and education. Primitive people are ones who have a different means of conveying knowledge (from the modern perspective), and have a supportive social fabric to sustain them. Uneducated people are products of a modern society whose social system cannot support them.

The connection here is that children who learn with games and the internet will learn skills usable later in life, and (evidently) will be supported by the supportive embrace of technology. This sort of implicitly assumes that other educational approaches have failed in the modern age. There are still dangers here, games that support also have biases, they may have agendas, and the ones that are fun tend to be ones that do not require critical thinking. Games such as Civilization are fun and require thinking, but thinking within the model of civilization put forth by the developers. It does not truly teach critical thought, because, like rote drill and practice, promotes adoption of one model, and one model only.

How is the simulation internalization model different from the “games and violence” or “tv and violence” models of social systems? Kids learn via doing (ex with Lego/Logo, etc), and they know to distinguish real from make believe. This requires a kind of literacy and awareness, though.