Nicholas Negroponte is an investor, thinker, writer and founder of the MIT media lab, in Boston.
He says that paper publications are underway out and hyper personal media are underway in: digital culture is going to swell this old fashion. For him, the physical book is gone in 5 years because physical media can be distributed to enough people.
He argues saying that when you go to Africa, 500 000 people want books. You can’t send the physical thing but if you send 100 laptop with each 100 books on it, it make 10 000 (in an African village without electricity for example, it’s a good thing).
We can make a parallel between the apparition of cell phones and e-books in developing countries: in Uganda, Cambodia, cell phones were most popular because they didn’t have phone, so they will do the same and adopt e-books much fast to the will because they don’t have anything else.
For him, it’s certainly most pleasant to read the newspaper but he says that the I-pad experience is much better than the newspaper one.
The journalist points out the fact that sometimes, you see an article what catch your attention and you want to read it, which is not possible with the I-pad. To that, N. Negroponte responds that is true that the peripheric vision is missing but the experience steel better because they have done a good job and it is possible to go deeper now and download colors photos, videos…
Then they talk about the “Daily Me”. It is a way to get personal information. For example, if there were news concerning the journalist before N. Negroponte meets him, this news would have come up in his additions. People could put all they want to.
Finally, the journalist asks him if it’s not overwhelming to consume too many technologies. He responds that it is important to be able to modulate this: instead of going off one week disconnected, you can go off two weeks and be connecting (half an hour a