Book: The Media Lab

A rather famous 1987 book by Stewart Brand about MIT's future-defining laboratory headed by Nicholas Negroponte and Marvin Minsky. I'd heard about it but never seen a copy before, so when I ran across one used I had to snap it up.

It's terribly dated of course.  1987 was very early for personal computers—ten years after the first Apple, three after the first Mac—and about three years before the internet. The Media Lab anticipated all these changes of course, and maybe even birthed a few of them. Holograms, instant worldwide communication, computer graphics, motion capture, AI, CDs and DVDs were just a few of the projects the Media Lab pioneered.

Stewart Brand is still alive, amazingly, as is the Lab.
https://www.media.mit.edu/

It's almost impossible to overstate how much the world of "media" changed since 1990.

The CD was about a year old.  DVDs were still eight years in the future. Yet:

Stewart Brand wrote:

I can see no reason for anyone to work in the analog domain anymore—sound, film, video. All transmission will be digital.

The author mentions a 1978 interactive demo where Andy Lippman filmed all the streets of Aspen Colorado, and then linked all of the films together with a computer so a person could virtually walk down any street in Aspen, turn any corner, look left or right or behind you.

Silly idea.  It'll never catch on.

Almost done with the book.  It's been disorienting, reading about a "future" that was twenty years past.

Except for a few predicted technologies that haven't come to pass.  One is "Personal Television" where you dictate the content.  I have "Personal Radio" with Pandora, but aside from PPV and DVR I have no control over the damn idiot box.  I have 300+ channels, but at any moment 295 of them are in commercial.

Probably this is because broadcast TV is a monopoly, with only about three players nationwide.  Why innovate when you can soak the consumers, making them PAY for content and making them watch 28 minutes of commercials every half hour?