In his first column for US wired, in 1993,
Nicholas Negroponte refused to be distracted by HDTV -- predicting
instead the ways a digital revolution would alter how we consume
content. Now, in a historic return to the magazine, he explains why
MIT's Media Lab is so vital.
The digital world creates convergence, overlap and blur in
previously separate, distinct and crisply defined areas. Simple
definitions, such as being inside or outside something, being part
of or not part of something else, being for or against just about
anything... all of these are suddenly subject to reinterpretation.
Today, "either/or" is "both/and" in so many different ways. All
things digital commingle where and when they never have before.
Examples: work and home, reader and author, education and
entertainment, container and content.
The medium is not the message. The message is the message and
can be rendered in many ways. For example, books are not about
paper, but about narrative, created with the basic DNA of digital
life, binary digits. Since 1948 we have called them bits (most
people think the word is much older).
Whatever the post-digital world may be, we know it is a fuzzy
world, with blurred definitions and overlapping disciplines. As
recently as ten years ago, academic and research aspirations
included being interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, words
usually used to describe the avant-garde of higher
education. Today, by contrast, the very idea of disciplines is
coming apart, in favour of a less compartmentalised and a more
imaginative and more creative world. Said differently, perspective
is more valuable than IQ.
Salon des Refusés
The idea to build the Media
Lab first came up in the autumn of 1979. It was generally
considered a fool's errand. Nevertheless, the process of doing it,
of pulling together the constituent parts, was frictionless. MIT
had no schools or departments that laid claim to education,
journalism, graphics, film, animation or
human-computer interface design. So putting them all under one
roof was easy.
But why bother?
The answer is simple and was simple, even all those years back.
"Computers are not about computing, but everyday life." This
32-year-old statement is, hands down, my most widely quoted.
By extension and less quoted then and now, new ideas in computer
science would come from the applications, not from basic science.
New ideas would emerge from creative uses and users, from a
heterogeneous collection of edgy, unorthodox people. In the case of
the Media Lab, those people came from various parts of MIT, from
architecture to physics, from music to maths. In some cases those
same faculties were no longer welcome in their home departments. In
that sense, the founding faculty was a veritable Salon des
In October 1985, we moved into a brand new building, specially
designed by IM Pei. At the opening ceremonies, Steve Jobs was our
keynote speaker and Martha Stewart was our caterer. Michael
Crichton spoke at the event as well. Did we know where we were
going? No. But we knew it would be orthogonal to the mainstream,
contrarian and follow an "omelette theory of life".
What I mean by that is: the pre-digital world was like a fried
egg, with that very crisp line between yellow and white. But in a
future era of bits, as I said before and believed then, these bits
would commingle and create a very porous world. Life would become
an omelette, instead of a fried egg. Over the next 27 years life
did just that.
Solutions without problems
Over the course of that period a new economic model for funding
research evolved around shared intellectual property. Simply
stated, companies were members of a club versus sponsors of
"directed research". Members had privileges; all members had
the same ones. From the lab's point of view, adding members had a
low incremental cost and faculty worked on projects of their
choosing. The reason this worked was sheer numbers. The lab was
filled with solutions without knowing the problems. Seriously.
We were not solving problems, but inventing solutions and
developing technology, in many cases for its own sake. Like a
gold mine, companies just had to find it.
McCulloch characterised the difference between a dog and a
human. When pointing, he said, the dog looks at the tip of your
finger and the human looks in the direction in which you are
pointing. Media Lab projects pointed. Quod erat
demonstrandum. Said differently: the best vision is peripheral
Some sponsors made millions by looking in that direction. Others
did not. The same project that was viewed with delight by one
company might be viewed as boring to another. But what all
companies saw was a passion, in faculty and students, living proof
that love is a better master than duty.
Two giants influenced the Media Lab: Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. Minsky cofounded
the field of artificial intelligence and Papert laid the foundation
for learning in the digital age in his book, Mindstorms. Together
they brought not only deep thinking but the idea of thinking about
Both men believe that computer programming is a way for children
to learn about thinking and that the iterative process of debugging
(a computer program) is the closest approximation a child will get
to understand and see his or her own learning. This view of
education, so-called constructionism, lived in the lab from the
earliest days. Call it learning by doing. However, this simple idea
all but fell off the table over the past quarter century of
educational technology, while people and companies made more and
more applications to be "consumed" by children and teachers
Today, programmes such as Khan Academy, Coursera and MIT's own
edX are, in my opinion, blindly focused on teaching, not learning.
Course correction is needed. Pun intended.
Innovation versus invention
The Media Lab is about ideas, about inventions, about
breakthroughs in science. These should not be confused with
entrepreneurship or innovation, two equally important but different
elements of a vibrant society and strong economy. Not all ideas
make startups and almost all startups make small ideas. While the
current trend in academia, especially in business schools, is to be
entrepreneurial, it can lead to small thinking -- and usually
When I think of the Media Lab, what it has done and what it
should do in the future, I remind myself that normal market forces
are important, but not enough. Some things will not happen in an
economy driven only by markets. And that is the main reason you
need a Media Lab. If industry can do what we are doing, we
should not be doing it.
Negroponte is the chairman emeritus of MIT's Media Lab. He was
the first investor in Wired magazine in 1992, after founder Louis
Rossetto pitched him at TED. A $75,000 investment for ten percent
of the magazine led to a regular back-page column.
This article was taken from the November 2012 issue of
Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print
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