Technology

Professor Nicholas Negroponte's new book "Being Digital" explores the future of new information technology and how it will challenge today's perceptions of the future. Ten years ago, Negroponte created the now famous and innovative Media Laboratory at MIT. He believes a fundamental change in how we live is coming with the newest computer technologies. He is also a popular columnist for Wired Magazine.

Steven Levy is an expert on computer technology, a Fellow of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in New York, and a columnist for the magazine "Macworld." His new book is "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything."

John Lee is a former member of the Masters of Doom. Federal agents had been monitoring the rivalry between his gang and their rivals, The Legion of Doom. Lee was arrested and sent to jail.

Journalists Michelle Slatalla and Joshual Quittner both work for Newsday. They've collaborated on a new book, called "Masters of Deception." It's about two rival gangs of teenage computer hackers in New York City, Masters of Deception and the Legion of Doom. The gangs, broke into phone company computers, downloaded confidential credit histories, and broke into private and corporate computer files. The rivalry was friendly until a computer remark by one hacker set off a "gang war."

Journalist Steven Levy, author of "Hackers," is one of the premiere writers on technology. He writes The Iconoclast column for "Mac World" magazine, and is a contributor to "Wired," "The New Yorker," and the "New York Times Magazine." He talks with Terry today about e-money — the electronic currency of the future. Levy has an article in the December issue of "Wired" about the computerization of money.

Computer viruses are computer users' worst nightmare, but a mystery to many of us. Computer expert Corey Sandler has written an easy-to-understand article about viruses in the September issue of "PC Computing." Today, Sandler explains how viruses work and talks to virogens, the writers of virus programs.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg talks about the computer language of the nineties, and looks at how new "information age" words sound remarkably like George Orwell's Newspeak.

Terry talks with New Yorker writer John Seabrook about the downside of electronic mail. Then she gets a response from Stewart Brand, the inventor of The Well, a computer conference system. . . Last January Seabrook wrote an article in the New Yorker magazine about Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates. Seabrook was flooded with electronic mail as a result, and to his surprise he was "flamed" for the first time. In Internet jargon, to be "flamed" is to receive an obscene or derogatory E-mail message. Seabrook said he'd never received anything like it before.

Commentator Jim Northrup looks at computers on Native American Reservations.

Writer Howard Rheingold. In his newest book, "The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier" (Addison- Wesley) he argues that although computer mediated communication has made it possible for people to have access to almost anything, it is dangerous as well. Rheingold says individuals must keep using the internet as a way to express their views or they will loose the ability to do so, as the government and large corporations become more aware of the technology's capabilities.