With Me++ the author of City of Bits and e-topia
completes an informal trilogy examining the ramifications
of information technology in everyday life. William
Mitchell describes the transformation of wireless
technology in the hundred years since Marconi--the scaling
up of networks and the scaling down of the apparatus for
transmission and reception. It is, he says, as if
"Brobdingnag had been rebooted as Lilliput"; Marconi?s
massive mechanism of tower and kerosene engine has been
replaced by a palm-size cellphone. If the operators of
Marconi?s invention can be seen as human appendages to an
immobile machine, today?s hand-held devices can be seen as
extensions of the human body. This transformation has, in
turn, changed our relationship with our surroundings and
with each other. The cellphone calls from the collapsing
World Trade Center towers and the hijacked jets on
September 11 were testimony to the intensity of this new
state of continuous electronic engagement.
Thus, Mitchell proposes, the "trial separation" of bits
(the elementary unit of information) and atoms (the
elementary unit of matter) is over. With increasing
frequency, events in physical space reflect events in
cyberspace, and vice versa; digital information can, for
example, direct the movement of an aircraft or a robot arm.
In Me++ Mitchell examines the effects of wireless linkage,
global interconnection, miniaturization, and portability on
our bodies, our clothing, our architecture, our cities, and
our uses of space and time. Computer viruses, cascading
power outages, terrorist infiltration of transportation
networks, and cellphone conversations in the streets are
symptoms of a dramatic new urban condition--that of
ubiquitous, inescapable network interconnectivity. He
argues that a world governed less and less by boundaries
and more and more by connections requires us to reimagine
and reconstruct our environment and to reconsider the
ethical foundations of design, engineering, and planning
practice.
Contents
- Prologue
- Boundaries/Networks
- Connecting Creatures
- Wireless Bipeds
- Downsized Dry Goods
- Shedding Atoms
- Digital Doublin'
- Electronic Mnemotechnics
- Footloose Fabrication
- Post-Sedentary Space
- Against Program
- Cyborg Agonistes
- Logic Prisons
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index