These are Negroponte's collected and expanded columns for the techno-style bible Wired (that's the one Smiths never know whether to stick on the shelves with computer-geek periodicals or The Face). As a book it's part explanation, part rune-casting as we slide towards what its author sees as our newly wired future; thus, a text filled with the Internet and CD-ROM, with interaction and ever microsizing processors, fibreoptics and digital communications. The curious but techno-illiterate start here. The problems spring from the other stuff, the forward-looking stuff; the Wired stuff, if you like. As director of the media lab at MIT, Negroponte has to be listened to; how far, is another question.

There are essentially two views of the future: the thrusting silver-suited Dan Dare world where super-advances in human technology give us ever smaller, ever more powerful computers, complete with life on Mars; and the more pessimistic, even fatalist view that the pace of human development is slowing, that eventually everything will be abandoned to rust, like the rockets of the original Apollo programme. Negroponte is very much of the former school, constantly excited at the ever-expanding limits of human ingenuity. Seldom does he posit an idea as anything less than certain. In the future multiplex, then, he will be luxuriating in 2001, while some of us are sneaking into a smoky Alphaville revival.

The point is that technology has already effectively destroyed nostalgia and is setting its sights on history itself. The CD, video, CD-ROM, the ability to reference virtually anything across the Internet, has the effect of bringing everything into the now. When the past and the present (maybe even the future) exist in the same moment - this temporal simultaneity - what price history? Digitising, as Atom Egoyan recently put it, is a bid for immortality.

The Net is a place of total anonymity, political anarchy in its purest incarnation. But technological and political censorship (thank German CompuServe at the end of last year), and the embarrassingly limited horizons of human imagination limit possibility. The number of sites dealing in, say, Tibet, or the innovative art of a Jenny Holzer, are as nothing to those thousands larded in hardcore pornography. JG Ballard might claim, with some validity, that what a healthy society needs is more sex and violence, but one cannot help but feel servers world-wide are being employed for the easy prurient fix, not political or social expansion. Creeping commercialisation in the form of advertising and, increasingly, on-line publishing of the likes of Penthouse, Hustler, and Omni (soon to exist only in electronic form) threaten the chaotic possibilities of the system. Once Disney and their ilk find their way, it is not hard to see the end up ahead. As Steve Jobs, the brains behind Apple said recently (in Wired, ironically):

We live in an information economy, but I don't believe we live in an information society. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

Either way, there is a veritable ocean of information we will be expected to navigate, no matter how closely controlled.

The fact is that the power-mongers of this apparent new age - the captains of the ocean liners - will not be the Rupert Murdochs of this world, the super-media conglomerates created by Disneyists (they'll publish your first novel, make the movie, merchandise it, dupe the tape and sell you the Happy Meal). Nor will the geek inherit the earth. The power lies not with the explorers of the digital age, cutting a swath with the provision of the infobahn, but with the priests, the techno-magi able to filter the rush of information pouring out of the ground and ether. Knowledge is power, is axiomatic. Dominance remains with those that can interpret and - more importantly, mythologise - the myths of the near future. Otherwise all we will be left with is a vast library visited only librarians.

North-South, East-West, Capitalist-Communist, all geo-political divides are essentially self-imposed. The only divide that seems to have a genuine physical presence is that between rich and poor. It is a schism that can surely be replicated only in Negroponte's brave new digital world. Should his wired vision come to pass, it is the disenfranchisement of the poor (both financial and informational) that will have the most critical repercussions:

And that disenfranchisement will be as much through personal choice as lack of access. Negroponte proselytises on behalf of digital TV, the power and access of e-mail (he is particularly good on explaining the concept of digital mail as addressing the individual and not physical space). But access to these bright new technologies is as much to do with their atoms (he is keen on explaining the digital age in terms of ephemeral bits and physical atoms) as the willingness to interact with the attendant possibilities. Interaction with your TV has potential benefits in terms of, say, time-shifting on a hitherto unimagined scale, but ultimately, how many viewers (users?) actually want to indulge? Negroponte doesn't convince that the ability to select camera-angles or shop by TV is underwritten by the desire to do so. He talks up the chance to filter news and publish your own daily newspaper tailored expressly to your own likes and dislikes as though this had no implication beyond self-gratification. How easy is it to obliterate the unpalatable? Ignore that which depresses, distresses, or contradicts? The real content of any medium, Marshall McLuhan said, is the user of the medium; we are the content of our media.

Negroponte complains bitterly about travelling the world with a suitcase stuffed on power cables and telephone socket adapters to access his laptop to the Internet wherever he is. He promotes the idea of communication between microprocessors so that, for example, a delayed flight could signal your alarm clock to not bother ringing. But Negroponte is a man to whom sauntering between the States and Tokyo is an every day thing; do you have trouble with your laptop in Helsinki? Can't e-mail from Melbourne? Delhi?

Negroponte confuses capacity and demand constantly. He is right to say that writing a letter on a word processor, printing and faxing it across the world is ludicrous. If you have it in digital form already, where is the technical and financial sense? But he is underestimating the physical need of some people to handle those oily pieces of paper that snake out of a fax machine. The same way the majority (6 out of 10, apparently) still prefer cash over electronic credit. In his excitement he fails to recognise that people seem to prefer atoms over bits. Steve Jobs again:

Negroponte lives in a world where computers and their possibilities are fascinating. Most people invest more time in football or the Lottery than they ever will in cutting edge technology. Many would prefer to do nothing rather than something just for the hi-tech sake of it. There is a microprocessor in my car that will, via a satellite, tell me exactly where I am? All well and good, but the colour, and having a wheel at each corner is far more important to me.

Like those fools who push the idea of interactive and/or holographic movies, Negroponte seems unable time and again to differentiate between being able to do a thing and whether or not that thing is worth doing. As a guide to the now, an explainer of the current technologies, Digital is a handy, easily accessible primer; as soothsaying we should perhaps take a step back. This book has glowing, silver-embossed testimonials spread front to back from the likes of Douglas Adams, Rupert Murdoch (frighteningly), and Arthur C Clarke. What it needs is Ballard's celebrated dictum that the future is anything with a fin on it. Within a very short time Being Digital could look very quaint indeed.