User:Birgit bachler/readings2/negroponte digital

Negroponte N. (1996) Being Digital, Vintage Books New York

As opposed to the social divide between information-rich and information-poor Negroponte sees the real divide as a generational one.
"We twill socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role." (p. 7) >>How does the term neighborhood relate here to what Negroponte is talking about? When opposing it to the neighborhood-friendship comparison that Hoexum is mentioning, citing Michel de Montaigne. >>http://www.trouw.nl/opinie/letter-en-geest/article3368842.ece/Echt_leven_leer_je_met__je_buren___.html
"Like a Hollywood film, multimedia narrative includes such specific representations that less and less is left to the mind's eye.@ (p. 8) >>Mentioning Hollywood, have we learned to create our own representation as only celebrities used to have and what is indeed left to the mind's eye, comparing social networks that connect "real people's" profiles and avatars?
When looking at the digital future, Negroponte sees that "the answer lies in creating computers to filter, sort, prioritize, and manage multimedia on our behalf - computers that read newspapers and look at television for us, and act as editors when we ask them to so." (p. 20) >> Here Negroponte is painting a very positive picture when assuming the computer would act as an editor only when being asked.
"Beginners don't understand "less is more"" (p. 28) >> Taking Mies van der Rohe as an example for slick design Negroponte mentions that a new medium in the hands of a beginner always leads to exaggerated use of every possible function. How can his example of a home video camera be adapted to a medium like a social network. Are we tempted to test out and use every function in the beginning, and, as advanced user begin to act more carefully? Negroponte also refers to the pollution of styles through the possibility to change font styles and sizes. In this respect Facebook and its fixed template avoid disordered design and leave no space for experimentation here. Maybe this is one reason how we are tempted to make use of other Facebook functions, rather than spending time on making a personal design for our profile. The only possibility to make our profile look unique is by adding personal content to the empty, blue-white design-container.
"The growth of personal computers is happening so rapidly that the future open-architecture television is the PC" … "displays filled with tons of memory and lots of processing power" (p.41) >>When seeing these powerful displays as a prediction for the advent of devices such as the iPad there is a contradiction with the idea of open-architecture.
"Today's TV set lets you control brightness, volume, and channel. Tomorrow's will allow you to vary sex, violence and political leaning." (p. 49) When regarding for example YouTube as tomorrow's TV, we have the choice to vary on the content we see, to search, rate and comment, as well as contribute ourselves. By the way sex, violence and politics - are they featured on YouTube explicitly? But aside the offered variation, algorithms do imitate to a certain extent the role of the broadcaster by recommending content and creating mixes and automated playlists.
"All of a sudden TV becomes a random access medium, more like a book or newspaper, browseable and changeable, no longer dependent on time or day, or the time required for delivery. " … "many creative and engaging new applications." (p. 50)
"Take the weather as an example."… "These bits arrive in your computer-TV and then you, at the receiving end, implicitly or explicitly use local computing intelligence to transform them into a voice report, a printed map, or an animated cartoon with your favorite Disney character." … "maybe even depending on your disposition and mood at the moment." … "You decide that". (p. 55) >> Here, (again), Negroponte assumes that the control over the transformation of bits is dependent on local computing power and is subject to the decision of the user. He considers even the user's disposition and mood to be a possible mean of control over the output. This personalization of data is a romantic idea that misses at this point of the book the danger of manipulation and mis-interpretation as well as the fact, that the weather outside will not change according to the user-specific design chosen on a display. Later, he elucidates: "Surey, the 'real thing' is not an expression of itself, but is itself." (p. 60)
"The medium is no longer the message." (p. 61)
"…when ink is squeezed onto dead trees. This is the step where bits become atoms." (p. 55)
"I am convinced that by the year 2005 Americans will spend more hours on the Internet (or whatever it is called) than watching network television." (p. 58)
"Furthermore, computer programs, not just people, will be reading material such as this book and making, for example, automatic summaries." (p. 60)
Weather: computer model is best described as a simulation of weather and as close to the "real thing" as can be imagined - "real thing" is not an expression of itself but is itself. "These expressions are not in the data, but are embodiments of them made by a quasi (or really) intelligent machine. (p. 80f)
To what degree can the notion of formless data be extended to less prosaic material? … When bits are bits, we have a whole new suite of questions, not just the old ones like piracy. "The medium is no longer the message." (p.81) "The medium is not the message in a digital world. It is an embodiment of it." (p. 71)
Technological pull & media companies: …"not only reuse of music and film libraries but also the expanded use of audio and video, mixed with data, for as many purposes as possible, in multiple packages and through diverse channels."(p. 63) // 'digitally remastered'
"In the digital world (…) we can expect readers and authors to move more freely between generalities and specifics. In fact, the notion of 'tell me more' is very much part of multimedia and at the root of hypermedia." (p.69)
"Being digital will change the nature of mass media from a process of pushing bits at people to one allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them. This is a radical change, because our entire concept of media is one of successive layers of filtering, which reduce information and entertainment to a collection of "top stories" or "best-sellers" to be thrown at different "audiences"." (p.84) // pulling vs pushing of content , what has changed in the relationship between audiences and creators (invisibility)
"IS the digital marketplace real? Yes, but only if the interface between people and their computers improves to the point where talking to your computer is as easy as talking to another human being. (p. 85) //?I beg your pardon, Mr Negroponte?
"The challenge for the next decade is not just to give people bigger screens, better sound quality and easier-to-use graphical input devices. It is to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages." (p. 92)
2001: ASpace Odyssey "Oddly the movie came out before the book"…"Clarke was able to see and hear his ideas before committing them to print"; "The Knowledge Navigator" (p. 92f)
"What HAL and the Knowledge Navigator have in common is that they exhibit intelligence to such a degree that the physical interface itself almost goes away." (p. 93)
"A good computer interface" … " The problem is less like designing a dashboard and more like designing a human." (p. 94)
On the Cloud: Time sharing… dividing the resource among ten people was not just each person using one tenth of a machine "but that one person's moment of reflection could be another person's full use of the computer." (p.95)
"My dream for the interface is that computers will be more like people." (p. 101)
"Good human-computer interface design included the computer understanding incomplete, ambiguous thoughts, typical of the early stages in any design process, versus the more complete and consistent presentations of complex, finished renderings." (p. 104)
"Personal computers are less able to sense human presence than are modern toilets or outdoor floodlights that have simple motion sensors. Your inexpensive auto-focus camera has more intelligence about what is in front of it than any terminal or computer system." (p. 129)
"It may be time to ask what will make it easier for computers to deal with humans. For example, how can you possibly hold a conversation with people if you don't even know they are there? You can't see them, and you don't know how many there are. Are they smiling? Are they even paying attention? We talk longingly about human-computer interactions and conversational systems, and yet we are fully prepared to leave one participant in this dialogue totally in the dark. It is time to make computers see and hear." (p. 128)
"The robot must depend on its own judgement" (p. 128)
"Your face is, in effect, your display device , and your computer should be able to read it, which requires the recognition of your face and its unique expressions." (p. 129) // see also Lanier

Where mice and track balls really become useless is drawing." (p. 130)

"In the net millennium, we will find that we are talking as much or more with machines than we are with humans." (p. 145)

"In fact, the concept of 'agent' embodied in humans helping humans is often one where expertise is indeed mixed with knowledge of you." …. "Interface agents must learn and develop over time, like human friends and assistants."(p. 155)

>> Minsky "The Society of Mind": 'intelligence is not found in some central processor but in the collective behavior of a large group of more special-purpose, highly interconnected machines.' (p. 157)>>>>

"Our interfaces will vary. Yours will be different from mine, bases on our respective information predilections, entertainment habits, and social behavior-all drawn from the very large palette of digital life." (p. 159)

!!! "In the post-information age, we often have an audience the size of one. Everything is made to order, and information is extremely personalized. A widely held assumption is that individualization is the extrapolation of narrowcasting - you go from a large to a small group, ultimately to the individual. By the time you have my address, m marital status, my age, my income, my car brand, my purchases, my drinking habits, and my taxes, you have me - a demographic unit of one."

…"the difference between narrowcasting and being digital. In being digital I am me, not a statistical subset. Me includes information and events that have no demographic or statistical meaning. Where my mother-in-law lives, whom I had dinner with last night, and what time my flight departs for Richmond this afternoon have absolutely no correlation or statistical basis from which to derive suitable narrowcast services." (p. 164)

"In the post-information age, since you may live and work at one or many locations, the concept of an "address" now takes on new meaning." (p. 166)

"Telephone tag" >>> Tagging game (p. 167)

"Digital life will include very little time to broadcast." // "on demand" (p. 168)

"The user community of the Internet will be in the mainstream of everyday life. Its demographics will look more and more like the demographic of the world itself. The true value of a network is less about information and more about community. The information superhighway is more than a short cut to every book in the Library of Congress. It is creating a totally new, global social fabric. " (p. 183)

"Brevity is the soul of e-mail" (p. 193) // e-mail: several MBs vs. tweet/SMS

"E-mail is a life-style that impacts the way we work and think." (p. 193)

On Plugs, Europlug…. "As we evolve our digital living, more and more the roadblocks are likely to be physical, not electronic." (p. 195) // bus-standards, USB etc

"Computers are taking on personalities." … "The persona of a machine makes it fun, relaxing, usable, friendly and less 'mechanical' in spirit. (p. 219) // Example: spelling correction "also" as "also" becomes "asshole"

"Personal computers will make our future adult population simultaneously more mathematically able and more visually literate." (p. 220)