I first read Being Digital during the emergent years of the Web, when we were all discovering for ourselves how our lives would be shaped through technology. It was published in 1995, and its author, Nicholas Negroponte was establishing himself as a mover and shaker on the digital landscape. He had already founded MIT's Media Lab, and was well on the way to making sure Wired Magazine would become a must read for the tech savvy (I remain a subscriber). Eventually, he would go on to establish what arguably became him crowning achievement - the One Laptop Per Child project, which has had such wide reaching impact on global education. One of the significant statements Negroponte made in Being Digital was that everything (and he meant everything) was being transformed from atoms to bits. In other words, the world was going digital. In many ways, he was right. The entertainment world, news and media, commerce, business and communication sectors have all more or less migrated to digital format, and this is as irrevocable as it is transformative.
It was an absolute pleasure to meet Nic and spend time talking with him over dinner in London ahead of the Learning Technology conference in January 2013. He told me and our fellow diners some wonderful stories about how his work in digital media was progressing, and gave us a unique insight into the history of technology and his association with other luminaries of the digital world. You can read more about our conversation here. I brought my first edition copy of Being Digital along to the meal for him to sign. He duly obliged and his autograph added greater value to what was already one of my prized possessions.
Tomorrow: Selfie number 1
Photo by Donald Taylor
Selfie number 2 by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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