• The Media Lab is a $45 million dollar facility located on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s east campus.
• Nicholas Negroponte was founder and director of the Media Lab.
• “. . . Negroponte’s conviction is that something big and convergent is happening to the whole gamut of communications media ­ television, telephones, recordings, film, newspapers, magazines, books and, infesting and transforming them all, computers.”
• Stewart Brand, a journalist and author of Whole Earth Catalog, decided to spend some time at MIT to see if Negroponte’s conviction was right.  Spent 3 months there.
• The book is about two media labs ­ the one at MIT and the “worldwide media lab, in which we’re likely to be experimenters for the rest of our lives.”  Both of these worlds are busy shaping each other, Brand says.
• Part 1 is about the Media Lab at MIT, the second is about the media lab of the world.
• First chapter called “Demo or Die,” which is the Media Lab’s philosophy.
• “Make the case for your idea with an unfaked performance of it working at least once or let somebody else at the equipment.” The focus is engineering and science rather than scholarship; invention rather than studies, surveys or critiques.”
• The purpose of the Media Lab is to invent the future ­ to use computer technology to personalize and humanize everything. “The effect on mass media would be for the viewer, listener, reader, student to take over what is seen, heard, read, learned.”
• Rule: Do what’s good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what’s convenient for computers.
• It’s not about product development, but rather concept invention and development. It sells not what works but what might work.
• Talks a little about Negroponte and how he’s both an academic but a salesman, easily mixes with chairmen, directors and CEOs of large corporations.
• In 1987 the lab was divided into 11 groups, but oftentimes the activities intersected:
• Electronic Publishing ­ dealt with electronic books and self-personalizing electronic newspapers, magazines, and TV broadcasts. These are worked on in an area referred to as the “Terminal Garden.”
• Speech ­ dealt with voice recognition and things like phones that know your friends and can talk with them
• Advanced Television Research Program ­ dealt with improving the picture of television by using the computer technology
• Movies of the Future ­ dealt with the recording of paperback movies on CDs for example
• Visual Language Workshop ­ dealt with improving computer graphics and visual design
• Spatial Imaging ­ dealt with holography
• Computers and Entertainment ­ the lab’s lunatic fringe . . . dealt with artificial intelligence
• Animation and Computer Graphics ­ dealt with seeking real-time computer animation
• Computer Music ­ explored new performance methods and music cognition
• The School of the Future ­ also called The Hennigan School ­ the idea of the school was to find out what happened when you really put computers in a grade school
• Human-Machine Interface ­ dealt with creating machines that can read lips and eyes
• Chapter 2, New Media Receiving, talks about the latest in new media such as compact disks and wireless cable TV, e-mail, Bulletin Board Systems, VCRs, the failure of laser videodisks, the coming proliferation of ISDN (integrated services digital network) and how digital is replacing analog.
• Chapter 4, New Media Sending, talks about broadcast, TV, cable TV, satellite TV, optical fiber, HDTV and holography.
• Chapter 7 is devoted to describing the Hennigan School. The project was carried out in an inner-city Boston grade school to explore what could happen if there were enough computers ­ one per student. The program had only been running for about 5 months at the time the book was written.
• Chapter 8 talks about the history behind the Media Lab. In 1964, Negroponte, then an architectural student, wanted a machine that would help architects do better architecture, one that would be intensely interactive with the human user. So he started the Architecture Machine Group in 1967. The Media Lab eventually emerged from the Architecture Machine Group.
• Chapter 9 explains how the Media Lab is supported, first by government money through ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and subsequently DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and eventually mostly by large corporations, many of which were Japanese.
• Chapter 10 through 13 are Brand’s opinion. Some of what he opines are:
• Intellectual copyright will become more complicated in the future as new technology emerges.
• If technology shifts toward more control by the user, advertising will have to shift with it.
• He foresees a new communication principle as fundamental as freedom of speech and the press ­ the right of access.
• The important philosophers of the 20^th century will likely be the great science fiction writers.
• Without a lot of checks and balances, the creation of technology such as artificial intelligence could be harmful.
• The entire world economic game will change because of changes in communications technology. As the system becomes more electronic and interconnected, Brand fears a major financial crisis.
• Serious choices are being made in the media lab of the world. “A major one is whether human individuals will be the experimenters in the world lab or the experimentees, users of the future or mere consumers of the future. It will take a long political, economic and technological process to work that out, but we can decide now which way we want it to go.”

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