A history of the Media Lab, its concerns and its impact on modern cyberspace issues.
"At MIT's Media Lab the goal is for the audience to take over -- to make mass media individualized media. Nicholas Negroponte, the director of the Media Lab, is not impressed by personal computers. His vision is of personalized computers, televisions, even books that know the user so intimately that the dialogue between machine and human would bring about ideas unrealizable by either partner alone -- machines so perceptive they can respond to the user's voice, gestures, and the subtle movement of an eye.
"The rapidly converging technologies of recording, broadcasting, film, and publishing are in the process of redefining the entire field of communications media. New media are being created which transform the human abilities to express, to learn, to communicate. At the Media Lab are intelligent telephones that can chat with your friends, disembodied faces of real people that gesture and converse, interactive video discs, life-size holograms in midair, television sets that comb the networks and assemble programs that reflect each viewer's interests, and glimpses of computerized 'virtual reality'.
"'Communications technologies converge at the individual and at the world', writes Stewart Brand. While the Media Lab is transforming what happens at the interface with the individual, major changes also are occurring on the world level. A new kind of computer, based on massive parallel design, shows signs of extending the computer revolution into the indefinite future. The global structure of communications is being shaped not by policy but by traffic -- huge volumes of traffic in electronic entertainment and finance which are eroding national identities.
"'How will we directly connect our nervous system to the global computer?' is a question that begins to have meaning. And the Media Lab has a deeply humanistic answer". [jacket blurb, The Media Lab , 1987]
"Although about media future, there are enough gems of insight about the future of interconnectivity to keep this rich book ahead of the curve". --Kevin Kelly (in Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines , 1995).
"An important bit of cyber history". --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995).
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