Quiz Questions for Being Digital

Time's Harvest, Fall 1995

AGS 334 quiz questions for Being Digital

Last updated: 11/23/97
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These are the questions for Being Digital that you should be prepared to answer on the Final Exam. Note that the Final Exam will be cumulative. You will be able to use the texts and your notes in answering these questions. Also see the comments about this book.

What forms of information does Negroponte mention as being put in digital form? What are the advantages of having information in digital form?
Roughly, how much information will an individual have available? How does the author foresee that we will deal with this amount of information?
How is today’s information delivery organized (a) by technology form and (b) as business? How is this likely to change?
Negroponte extends the meaning of "the human interface." Give some examples from the book that show this extension. How can this interface be enhanced by (a) "Bits about bits" and (b) putting "intelligence" on the receiving side?
Being Digital describes at least three types of interfaces for telling a computer what to do. Describe each, and give some examples from the book.
What impact does Negroponte expect "being digital" to have on education? How could this work in the case of ISP? Of Time’s Harvest?

People in previous semesters have found Being Digital to be a difficult book.First of all, Negroponte is one of the gurus of the digital revolution. He is Director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MIT itself is one of the leaders in digital technology, and the Media Lab has developed the prototypes for many of the computer developments that Toffler, Zhuboff, Volti and Gates discuss. Here are some of the major points in Being Digital that you should watch for:

The amount of digital information available to individuals will escalate rapidly, quickly surpassing the stand-alone information stored on the computer itself, and dwarfing the total amount of information available to individuals today. We do not know what all the new information will be about; most of that will be determined by the market. But basically, anything that people will pay for will be copiously available. And "pay for" is also not a settled issue -- the rates could very well turn out to be very low.

We currently get information in very many different forms. Books, mail, newpapers, audio- and videotapes, CDs, CD-ROMs, computer diskettes and many other forms come to us physically, or in Negroponte's terms, "atoms." Telephone conversations, radio and TV programs, email, Web pages and radio programs come via "bits." Even the legal status of the various businesses is different. Until recently, telephone companies were regulated monopolies; each telephone company was given a territory, within which it was a monopoly, with business practices (rates, types of service, etc.) regulated by the State government. Broadcast radio and TV are very much like regulated monopolies, but regulated by the Federal government. Cable TV, however, is regulated by local governments. Newspapers, books and magazines are private businesses, not regulated at all (except by normal regulations all companies must follow, such as being required not to operate in restraint of competition). Web Sites currently are not regulated; the Supreme Court has so far decided that they are much more like newspapers than telephone companies. Publishers and broadcasters are responsible for their content, and can be sued over it, but telephone companies are not responsible, and cannot be sued. In summary, the information business is currently not a single business, but is strongly divided into sectors (magazines, telephone, ...) that each follows a different business model (regulated monopoly, competitive business, regulated content, ...).

Negroponte argues that the capacity, low cost and versatility of fully digital information will be conclusive, and all of our information will move to digital format. Especially, information will move away from "atoms" and into "bits." To a lesser but still conclusive extent, digital information is cheaper than analog information such as our present TV and radio programs, and local telephone connversations (long-distance is already digital). This will result in a large-scale economic drama of megers, new companies and business failures that will be fascinating to watch.

The information business is really one business, not many. Similarly to there being one automobile business, with many companies (counting foreign manufacturers) there will be one information business with many similar companies. Negroponte's phrase here is "bits are bits", and it doesn't matter whether they are part of a telephone conversation, a newspaper or a movie. The business of transporting those bits is the same business, regardless of what happens to them on either end. Negroponte argues that this will mean that eventualy there will be information transporters that, like trucking companies for freight, carry information from place to place, and that there will not be all the different business models that we have now. Negroponte (and others) seem to believe that the information business will in fact develop very much like the trucking business; there will be transporters of information that will have to offer uniform pricing and accept all customers up to the limit of their capacity, and on the other hand there will be information or content providers that will originate information and ship it using the information transporters. Who will be in charge of the business? Will it be like cable TV where the transporter (cable company) is in control and seels a package from various providers, or will it be like trucking, where the freight companies are hired by those who want to ship products? If you want to play, you have to pay, and the cost to get in is hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. And if you bet wrong, you may have to kiss all of that money good-bye! If you pay attention, this will be a high-stakes drama for the next several decades. The recent communications acts have removed much of the former regulation, and most of the rest is being phased out. Your telephone company will want to sell you movies, and your cable company will want to sell you telephone service and Internet access. And you think you got a lot of calls from those different telephone companies!

[All of us in the Detroit area have heard a lot about the cutthroat early days of the car business, with spectacular deals, double crosses, instant millionaires who go broke the next year, reputations made and ruined, etc. The information business will also be cutthroat -- deja vu.]

Digital information transportation will be so cheap that "bits about bits" (another Negroponte phrase) will become important. Bits about bits will make it possible for us to customize the form in which we ultimately use information. Do we want to read a description of the weather, or look at a map, or look at a picture, or look at pictures of how people would dress for that weather? We will be able to choose how we display the same flow of information, since bits about bits will carry the information that our appliances will need to do this. For example, we will probably have a single information appliance instead of the many that we do now. The telephone, the TV set, the radio, the computer, the newspaper/magazine rack or table, will all merge into one or two appliances that can do it all.

Negroponte also discusses several generations of "user interfaces." The user interface for a computer is the way in which the user controls the computer. The first type of interface that most of us remember was the "command line." The computer would pause with some kind of prompt on the screen, waiting for us to type in a command. An example here is the dreaded "DOS prompt." The next generation was the "graphical user interface" also known as GUI, in which the user clicked on menus and icons. The Windows and Macintosh computers are primary examples of GUIS. Negroponte argues that the next type of interface will be the "agent"; software that follows our directions or hints, and looks at what we wanted in the past. This type of interface will become necessary to select from the vast flow of information. Recall that Gates also wrote about agents.

In summary, then, Being Digital will give more detail about the types of technologies that are expected to become important in the future. Negroponte also lays out the forms that these technologies are expected to take. I am sure that you will understand that these technologies further undermine Toffler's six keys to industrial civilization, and that they increase individuation.