Review of Negroponte's Being Digital

Although I read Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital some seven or eight years after it came out, it is not really dated. There has been so many innovations since, and so many more of us are now digital that much of what he said when he wrote the book is now a bit passe.

However this should not diminish the accomplishments of the book. I learned quite a bit. Most importantly, I now see what it is like to have a digital imagination. Every page of the book is crammed with suggestions for the future. There is little that cannot be improved. And Negroponte has an idea for how to fix everything. He is right. He sees where millions of dollars are being invested in misguided enterprises to fix the wrong problem. He sees what the right problems are and how to go about solving them.

Negroponte knows what computers can do and he has the imagination to know what they should do. We can all learn something from this book.