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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 only
by policy but by traffic -- huge volumes of traffic in electric
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.
Stewart Brand is best known for founding,
editing, and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1985);
National Book Award, 1972) and the CoEvolution Quarterly
(now called Whole Earth Review; 1973-1984), but he
has also had a longstanding involvement in computers and
the media arts.
Following his degree in biology from
Stanford in 1960, and two years as a U.S. Infantry officer,
Brand became a photojournalist and multimedia artist, performing
at colleges and museum. In 1968, he was a consultant to
Douglas Engelbart's pioneering Augmented Human Intellect
program at SRI, which devised now-familiar interface tools
such as the mouse and windows. In 1972 for Rolling
Stone he wrote the first article
about the computer lifestyle, entitled "Fanatic Life
and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," chronicling
the fringes of computer science at Xerox PARC, the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and MIT. While editor
in chief of the Whole Earth Software
Catalog (1983-1985) Brand organized
the first "Hackers' Conference," which has since
become an annual event. Currently he is researching learning
in complex systems and lives with his wife, Patricia Phelan,
on a tugboat in San Francisco Bay.
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