2001, A Space Odyssey

The year 2001 is nearly at hand, but almost none of the film's advances has come to pass. The commercial shuttle in the film bears a marked resemblance in appearance to the Space Shuttle, but the real Shuttle takes no passenger reservations. If it did, the price of a round trip ticket would be on the order of $100 million. A space station of sorts may be in orbit by 2001, but it too will be a far cry from the one in the film. It certainly will not have a coffee shop. As for human visits to Jupiter, they seem further off now than they did in 1968.

Much the same can be said of most else that was once expected to characterize "the future." No fleets of supersonic airliners whisk us across the ocean in two hours. Save for a handful of aging Concordes, th

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that is, that the form which information took was fundamental in determining its significance. As Negroponte points out, digital technology has fundamentally undermined that notion. "The medium is not the message in a digital world. It is an embodiment of it" (p. 71). In the pre-digital world, for example, the written word, music, and pictures were essentially different in the way they could be conveyed; they were effectively isolated from one another. Someone could call a friend and read a written message (say, an item from a newspaper), but hardly send the accompanying picture. Today, an e-mail message might include both text and pictures, and perhaps sound recording as well; to the computers at both ends, all are simply streams of data bits, and all can be integral parts of one document. To an increasing degree, they can even be transformed; a weather photograph, as Negroponte suggests, could be transformed into a diagram with written notations (p. 55). One person might send a written musical score; the person at the receiving end can either read it as a score, or hear it as music. The other feature of digital technology--one now bedevilling the owners of intellectual property (p. 58), as well as everyone afflicte
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1687
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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