My reputation as a geek was cemented long before the Web was in vogue or even on most people’s radar.

I used “Archie” to wire my news reports from the field via a pay telephone and a clunky “modem” that attached to the phone receiver. I talked about journalism (okay, and Star Trek) on CompuServe. I spent countless hours waiting for a single photo to download on NSCA Mosaic, the first web browser.

But it was a book that changed my life.

Published in January 1996, “Being Digital” by Nicolas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, read like a history of the future – less prognostication than statements of fact. And Negroponte wrote like Wells’ time traveler, strutting through the pages with the utter confidence of someone who had seen it all.

The “Aha” moment for me, however, was his theory of “atoms and bits.” Put simply, Negroponte said that most information is delivered as “atoms,” solid object with mass such as newspapers, magazines and books (like this one). But “bits” moved at the speed of light, had no weight and virtually no limits on size – and as his example below illustrates, no geographic restrictions.

“Not long ago I attended a management retreat for senior executives of PolyGram in Vancouver, British Columbia. The purpose was to enhance communications among senior management and to give everybody an overview of the year to come, including many samples of soon-to-be-released music, movies, games, and rock videos. These samples were to be shipped by FedEx to the meeting in the form of CDs, videocassettes, and CD-ROMs, physical material in real packages that have weight and size. By misfortune, some of the material was held up in customs. That same day, I had been in my hotel room shipping bits back and forth over the Internet, to and from MIT and elsewhere in the world. My bits, unlike PolyGram's atoms, were not caught in customs.

“This is changing rapidly. The methodical movement of recorded music as pieces of plastic, like the slow human handling of most information in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, and videocassettes, is about to become the instantaneous and inexpensive transfer of electronic data that move at the speed of light. In this form, the information can become universally accessible. Thomas Jefferson advanced the concept of libraries and the right to check out a book free of charge. But this great forefather never considered the likelihood that 20 million people might access a digital library electronically and withdraw its contents at no cost.”

It seems almost pedantic now, but at the time this was outrageous thinking. Even more striking was Negroponte’s predictions for the news business – a world in which everyone had a virtual daily paper or “Daily Me” customized to each individual’s tastes. iGoogle, anyone?

Negroponte never made the leap to PR or marketing, but for some reason I made the connection and turned my attention and career to helping people communicate with bits. To be fair, Negroponte didn’t get it all right – he said, for example, that videocassette rental stores like Blockbuster would be out of business within 10 years. Well, okay, the videocassettes are gone but the stores are still there. Nevertheless, as broadband increases and costs drop, it’s not hard to see that paying for a physical piece of media and returning it later doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Twelve years into the future, Being Digital is still relevant, still prescient, and definitely still worth reading. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the book’s epilogue – or should I say prologue, as our world of bits is yet to be fully realized:

“The access, the mobility, and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so different from the present. The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people's wildest predictions. As children appropriate a global information resource, and as they discover that only adults need learner's permits, we are bound to find new hope and dignity in places where very little existed before.

My optimism is not fueled by an anticipated invention or discovery. Finding a cure for cancer and AIDS, finding an acceptable way to control population, or inventing a machine that can breathe our air and drink our oceans and excrete unpolluted forms of each are dreams that may or may not come about. Being digital is different. We are not waiting on any invention. It is here. It is now. It is almost genetic in its nature, in that each generation will become more digital than the preceding one. The control bits of that digital future are more than ever before in the hands of the young. Nothing could make me happier.”