Er, Robin--or rather, Nick Negroponte--how many people just watched the Super Bowl? I haven't noticed many changes since last weekend. I'm familiar enough with your thinking,Robing, to suspect/hope that there was at least a smidgen of irony in your post. Seriously, the Media Lab/Negroponte pontifications about how technology is going to change the world strike me as hopelessly naive, culturally biased in the extreme, and partaking of a curious form of infinite re- gression: it's always the NEXT technology--the current insiders' term is "frontier technology" (talk about a loaded term...)--which is going to effect this alleged change. It seems like the historical progression of styles is being supplanted by a succession of media, wrapped up in the rhetoric of democratization, but actually perpetuating the control of these media (and, to a large degree, the messages) by established interests. Read the 1988 Stewart Brand Media Lab hagiography: on the one hand, art is employed as a guarantor of "quality;" at the same time, art is looked at as a non-essential, leisure pursuit without political or social consequence. Negroponte is speaking at a bookstore in Brookline (Boston) next week, he said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Brian Wallace [log in to unmask]