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Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American architect and computer scientist who was the founding director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory and founded One Laptop per Child (OLPC). Negroponte gained fame with his book Being Digital (1995), which predicted a future in which digital technology becomes an intimate part of everyday life.

Negroponte was born to a wealthy Greek shipping family and lived in Le Rosey, Switzerland, London, and New York as a child. In 1961 he attended MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study architecture. The discipline directed him toward the use of computers as a tool in architectural design. In 1966 Negroponte graduated from MIT with a master’s degree in architecture and joined the faculty there. Over the next few years he also worked as a visiting professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968 he founded the MIT Architecture Machine Group, which performed some of the first human-computer interface research. Negroponte wrote a book, The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (1970), detailing his work.

Negroponte launched the MIT Media Laboratory in 1985. The lab was founded in response to the growing role of computers in modern life and had a mandate to raise funds and find creative ways to develop new digital media technologies. Controversially, the lab grew out of MIT’s School of Architecture rather than out of its School of Electrical Engineering, which housed the computer science department. By 1987 the lab was engaged in developing technologies such as speech recognition, electronic music, holography, advanced television, electronic publishing, and computer games. The lab attracted such high-tech luminaries as computer scientist Alan Kay, cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence philosopher Marvin Minsky, and computer scientist and mathematician Seymour Papert to conduct its research. It adopted an unusual “demo or die” credo, demanding that students and faculty not simply publish their technical research but also demonstrate innovations to the lab’s corporate sponsors.

Hagia Sophia. Istanbul, Turkey. Constantinople. Church of the Holy Wisdom. Church of the Divine Wisdom. Mosque.
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In addition to his Media Lab work, Negroponte funded more than 40 start-up businesses. One of the most successful was Wired magazine, to which Negroponte contributed $75,000 of his own money in 1992. In exchange for his money, Negroponte was given regular space to write an opinion column on digital culture for each edition, heightening the professor’s profile.

In 1995 Negroponte published his best-selling book Being Digital, in which he described and anticipated a future composed of digital bits that would be distinct from the archaic analog world comprising objects, or “atoms.” He predicted that the things in the world of atoms, such as newspapers, books, films, and cars, would largely continue to exist but would be substituted by digital bits in the form of new media. Most in the digital community agree that Negroponte was on target with his central insight—that bits will transform video, text, audio, and photography into a single unified medium.

In 2000 Negroponte took a leave from the Media Lab and founded OLPC, which seeks to provide laptop computers to the estimated 100 million children worldwide who are uneducated because of a lack of schools. OLPC has designed hardware and software to power rugged low-cost laptops for “self-empowered learning.” As of 2011, more than two million such computers have been distributed to children in developing countries.

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digital divide, term that describes the uneven distribution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in society. The digital divide encompasses differences in both access (first-level digital divide) and usage (second-level digital divide) of computers and the Internet between (1) industrialized and developing countries (global divide), (2) various socioeconomic groups within single nation-states (social divide), and (3) different kinds of users with regard to their political engagement on the Internet (democratic divide). In general, those differences are believed to reinforce social inequalities and to cause a persisting information or knowledge gap amid those people with access to and using the new media (“haves”) and those people without (“have-nots”).

The digital divide metaphor became popular in the mid-1990s, when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce published “Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America” (1995), a research report on Internet diffusion among Americans. The report revealed widespread inequalities in national ICT access, with migrant or ethnic minority groups and older, less-affluent people living in rural areas with low educational attainments being especially excluded from Internet services. That pattern was confirmed by follow-up surveys by the NTIA, which indicated also an initial gender gap in favour of men.

Although diffusion rates of the Internet subsequently rose in all groups, subsequent studies showed a perpetuating digital divide both in the United States and abroad. Some common characteristics emerged. In single nation-states, access to and usage of computer technology was stratified by age, education, ethnicity, race, family structure, gender, income, occupation, and place of residence. In that way, affluent young urban men and women with high levels of education who lived in small families with children were the greatest adopters of new media. Such people are most likely to possess ICTs (material or physical access), the experience and skills necessary to use the Internet (skills access), and sufficient free time to spend online (usage access). Here, Internet usage among advantaged groups includes searching for information to address professional or political interests. On the contrary, many people from less-advantaged groups have been shown to lack those basic navigation skills and to prefer entertainment on the Internet instead.

On the global level, additional factors such as per capita gross domestic product, international trade volume, degree of democratization, deregulation of the telecommunications market, density of communication infrastructure, and investments in research and development also influence Internet diffusion. Thus, industrial societies are more prone to implement new technologies than less-developed countries. For example, by 2012 the greatest intensity of national ICT access and usage had occurred in South Korea, Japan, and northern Europe.

Over time, the global digital divide has remained relatively stable. Yet, in single nation-states some gaps in ICT access and usage have slowly begun to fade. The early differences between men and women and between rural and urban areas of Western residences subsided, possibly due to extended telecommunications networks, lowered entry barriers, and additional ICT experiences at work. Other initial inequalities caused by factors such as age, education, ethnicity and race, and income, however, continued.

Those divergent developments and the various types of ICT access and usage encountered in single countries led some researchers to criticize the original description of a digital divide. In their opinion, the metaphor wrongly implies a binary construction of “haves” and “have-nots” on the basis of the simple notion of absolute and insurmountable class differences in technology. Alternatively, they postulate “digital inequality” as a gradual concept and therefore advocate multidimensional measures of Internet connectedness that take into account the history and context of Internet use, its scope and intensity, and, finally, the centrality of ICTs in people’s lives.

Similarly, policy initiatives conducted by supranational organizations (e.g., European Union and the United Nations), national governments, and private enterprises have been expanded to ameliorate worldwide differences in ICT usage. Although initially concentrating on mere improvement of technical access to computers and the Internet in rural areas and public institutions (e.g., in libraries and schools), projects designed to close the digital divide have shifted to also include civic information campaigns and ICT courses for specific user groups.

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Eva Johanna Schweitzer