ME++

October 7, 2004
Bill Mitchell | MIT

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.

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. 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.

Speaker Details

William J. Mitchell is Academic Head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences, and holds the Dreyfoos Professorship at the Media Lab. Formerly Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, he also directs the Media Lab’s Smart Cities research group, and serves as architectural adviser to the President of MIT.Among his publications are: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City; e-topia: Urban Life, Jim—But Not As We Know It, High Technology and Low-Income Communities; City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn; The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era; and The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition.Before coming to MIT, he was the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He previously served as Head of the Architecture/Urban Design Program at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and he has also taught at Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, and Cambridge Universities. In spring 1999 he was at the University of Virginia as Thomas Jefferson Professor.He holds a BArch from the University of Melbourne, MED from Yale University, and MA from Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Melbourne and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 1997 he was awarded the annual Appreciation Prize of the Architectural Institute of Japan for his “achievements in the development of architectural design theory in the information age as well as worldwide promotion of CAD education.”Mitchell is currently chair of The National Academies Committee on Information Technology and Creativity.