Being Digital by Nicolas Negropointe was a very interesting book. I am not a big reader so it is hard for me to get into a book. But Negropointe provided a new view of some of the implications of digital technology that I have never heard before. Some of the other things that kept me in the book were the short chapters and the simple analogies, which really help me understand him more about were he is coming from. I also like the way he showed me his perspective through non-technical terms. It was not hard to understand at all. I liked the way he views the impact of technology through diverse perspectives.
I was also particularly fond of the way he backed up or supported a lot of his information with real life stories and events. Now I am going to discuss in detail the parts of the book I liked and disliked. In chapter 1, I really liked the way Negorpointe used the terms bits and atoms. The way he described them and how they are used is amazing. I never would have thought a form of an atom would be a newspaper, magazine, or a book. Bits are pretty much any information not in physical material. I also liked the way he compared businesses, like the information delivery business being bits and the manufacturing business being atoms.
I never thought of the Internet, or the information superhighway as a global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light. It really opens up your eyes of what goes on everyday on the Internet. The part of Being Digital I liked most was chapter 13, and how the author talks about the transition from the industrial age to post industrial age. He made it a big point that we have discussed this subject so much and for so long, that we have not realized that we are about to pass the information age right into the post-information age. This book makes you think about the industrial age and how it is an age of these atoms that Negropointe talks about and how form this age we received the concept of mass production and the economies that come a long with it. It also makes you think about the information age and how it was the age of computers and the economies that came with it.
The Essay on Hdsl High Bit Digital Subscriber Line
HDSL What does HDSL stand for? High-bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line. When I first took on this topic I really was not sure what HDSL stood for. I knew about DSL but there were so many forms of DSL I really did not know one from the other. So I started at the basics. What is DSL? A digital subscriber link, a way to digitally connect residences and businesses to the Internet or remotely to a LAN. ...
Now it is the post-information age, and just like Negropointe said personalization is upon us. Everything is made for one. Information is extremely personalized. Some of the examples and predictions he gives in this chapter are great. One part of the book I didn’t agree with is in Chapter 14 and how the author thinks that VOD systems are going to put video stores and VCRs out of business. Video rentals will never die with Blockbuster and all the movies that are coming out. VOD systems are going to be too expensive and too much of a pain to hook up.
I really do not agree that video-rental stores will go under in less than 10 years. Finally, I believe that Negropointe took a good point and made it even better. I really enjoyed this book it really opened me up and made me think about a lot of things going on in our world today. It is one of those books that slaps you in the face with the truth whether you want to hear it or not.
