Being Digital

by Nicholas Negroponte and Alfred A. Knopf
New York, 1995
243pp, hb $23.0

Reviewed by Tim Druckery

"In a sense, virtuality, at the mental level is something I think you'd find in most leadership over historical periods. But in addition, the thing I want to talk about today, and that I find fascinating, is that we are not at a new place. It is just harder and harder to avoid the place we are." ---Newt Gingrich

As the AT&T ads poured over the broadcast networks last year it seemed unnervingly obvious that selling the present was insufficient. Instead the ads sold the future. "Ever read a book from 2000 miles away? Ever had an assistant who lived inside your computer? ... YOU WILL." The not so subtle inevitability of technology mediating virtually every facet of being has come to appear normal. In the mad rush to induce smart everything, culture finds itself between euphoria and exhaustion. One month's watershed technology is next month's techno-azoic fossil. And while the debate widens about the extent of bandwidth, the potential of compression, the speed of transfer, the so-called limitless access to data, the power of the network... (the list is endless), a pattern emerges. It is a pattern in which the future promises the fulfillment of the incomplete present. Finding a perspective amid the debates about technologies that will affect every, pardon the expression, fiber of life is no small task. Genetics, neurotechnology, biocomputing, stand aside multimedia, the world wide web, encryption, and wireless technologies as complex and often atomistic, nuisances. Yet the implications of the 'being digital' are far from resolved. After all, this is still a very analog world.

The imposing title Being Digital cannot but invoke such magisterial works such as Heidegger's Being and Time or Sartre's Being and Nothingness. But the aspirations of Negroponte's writing offers so little in the way of deep reflection that the title seems bafflingly ironic. Indeed amid the repetitious and solipsistic whining that plagues much of the book there emerges less an effort to come to terms with momentous issues, than a series of platitudes that have everything to do with digital and little to do with being. Imagine the philosophical renaissance that will take place with such pithy observations as "In being digital, I am me..." Roll over R. Descartes and tell Marv Minsky the news! Did you know that "the medium is no longer the message"? "Not since Marshall Mcluhan's Understanding Media..." reads the dust jacket. Ouch. Negroponte is to Mcluhan as bits are to atoms.

The past months have left a score of assessments of the effects of electronic culture. Special issues of Time (Hyperdemocracy and Welcome to Cyberspace), Newsweek (Technomania), Scientific American (The Computer in the 21st Century), New Perspectives Quarterly, Gender, Configurations, the list grows, proclaim the wonders and pitfalls of technoculture. This, amid daily flurries of data about Kevin Mitnick, PhiberQ "He used his computer like a magic carpet to cyberspace" (Joshua Quittner in Time Magazine)QOptik, the future of broadcast TV, the Telco's, Judge Green, advertisements on NBC for instant transcripts for the O.J. Simpson trial on the world wide web (that's O.J. Central, http:// www.pathfinder.com, Time Incs web initiative) make for an environment in which the intoxicated tone often seems a form of despair rather than one of anticipation.

Being Digital, essays reworked from Negroponte's Wired columns, ruminates on the quotidian mysteries of the digital age. Really, why is it that after 100 years we just cannot find a way to make a telephone handset that isn't "utterly unsatisfactory." Afterall, "why can't telephone designers understand that none of us want to dial telephones? We want to reach people on the telephone!" (Perhaps some of those multimediated millions at the Media Lab should be allocated to this little ontological, but alas analog, problem.) Did we know that "Technological imperatives-and only those imperatives-drove the development of television," or that "photography, on the other hand was invented by photographers. Television, I guess, was pure, it was then handed off to a body of creative talent, with different values, from a different intellectual subculture." To assume that photography's development was not driven by technological imperatives, but by photographers trying to invent a medium in which they were already practitioners, is as patently ludicrous as it is historically myopic. Being Digital is filled with this kind of tautology. But the sometimes reckless, and often rootless, logic of the arguments in Being Digital reveals a more important problem. The opening section of the book invokes the shift from "atoms to bits." Loosely speaking atoms represent the past and bits the future. For Negroponte this change is "irrevocable and unstoppable." Another section outlines the notion of the "post-information age... in which everything is made to order, and information is extremely personalized." It is, indeed, in this arena that the fundamental lapses in Being Digital emerge. Decidedly ahistorical, future oriented, and "optimistic," Being Digital is entangled in blissfully extolling the efficient pleasures of digital technology with too little regard for the the transformation of knowledge that comes with it: "Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped."

Many years ago Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote of Mcluhan's "global village" that it represented a "reactionary doctrine of salvation." Being Digital proposes a progressive doctrine, one that sounds like a bit too much like manifest destiny. Hypermedia, internet access, narrowcasting, bits, post-informational narcissicism...these don't add up to a confrontation with the being in the time of digital technology, they are the characteristics of the tools we use. Negroponte just doesn't find a discourse of power within the development of digital technology. Instead, "the combined forces of technology and human nature will ultimately take a stronger hand in plurality than any laws of congress." After the last election's plurality of 36 percent, this doesn't seem such an optimistic prognostication. Less rooted in the fulfillment of the necessity, digital technology has reconfigured the terms of identity and communication in terms of an imperative being mapped and theorized-perhaps sold is a clearer way to say it-by corporate development.

Being Digital, as much as it is a series of reflections on the development (or lack of the kind of development that Negroponte finds plausible), of digital technology, avoids acknowledging a great deal of serious thinking has been on-going about the cultural issues of technology. From reading Being Digital one is left with the erroneous conclusion that the Media Lab is the Olympus from which knowledge and wisdom in the digital age emanates. Being an insider can be very limiting-so much so that the cultural fabric is veiled with putative technologies and puzzling zeal. Afterall, Negroponte is, in many ways, correct. The urgency to find a mode of being in the miasma of accelerating technology is crucial. Agents, considered interface design, the post-geographical terrain of cyberculture, decentralization, interactivity...these are dynamic issues for a culture reeling in the digital. In an interview published after his death, Heidegger was asked what was to emerge to replace philosophy. He answered: "cybernetics," and elaborated:

in the cybernetically represented world, the difference between automatic machines and living things disappears. It becomes neutralized by the distinctionless process of information. The cybernetic world project, The victory of method over science,... In the uniformity of the cybernetic world, even man gets trained.

In the epilogue to Being Digital Negroponte writes: Finding a cure for cancer and AIDS, finding an acceptable way to control population, or inventing a machine that can breathe our air and drink our oceans and excrete unpolluted forms of each are dreams that may or may not come about. Being digital is different. We are not waiting on any invention. It is here. It is now. It is almost genetic in its nature, in that each generation will become more digital...