Commentary 18 Spaces Without Places: Pofiticizing Nicholas Negroponte's Technologizing Of Books Without Pages Brad Mehlenbacher, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8105 brad_m@ unity.ncsu.edu Introduction Nicholas Negroponte's prophetic article, "Books Without Pages," appeared in the proceedings of the International Conference on Communications (ICC) in 1979, one year before I graduated from high school and was introduced to my first software program and microcomputer, VisiCalc running on a TRS-80 with 64 bytes of memory. At the time I was focusing my attention on getting an undergraduate degree in language and communication-with little awareness of the technological developments taking place around me--and Nicholas Negroponte was exploring and developing emerging technologies that would ultimately inform my current research on online information design and human-computer interaction. In his 1979 article, Negroponte outlines the MIT Media Lab's early development of the SDMS (Spatial Data Management System), a design effort that is still in progress to this day. Negroponte begins his article with a description of a brave new technological world where "image processing, broadcast television, and computer graphics" or the "telephone, television, and microprocessing" will emerge as a seamless "media for communication" (56.1.1). The conference paper is then organized under six provocative section
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