One Digital Day (Hardcover)

In 24 hours, Smolan's team of the world's best photojournalists canvassed the world and captured pictures and accompanying stories which illustrate just how one little microchip -- something that didn't exist 30 years ago -- has changed, influenced and altered our world.  In so doing, the invention of the tiny microchip has succeeded in bringing the globe to us inside our homes and offices.

In the introduction, Michael Malone gives us a rundown on the microchip and how it is moving closer and closer to "the center of our lives." Malone estimates close to 15 billion microchips are currently in use.

Malone reminds us that, even though we might not have a PC in our home, should the microchips we use daily be stricken from our lives, we would be dumbfounded. Quite simply, we take their existence in our lives for granted in many ways.

Got a microwave? A telephone? A television for watching that Sunday football game? How about that streetlight outside? Without the microchip, your car wouldn't even start, writes Malone. Pretty amazing for a "tiny square of silicon the size of a fingernail," indeed.

What's it all about, Alfie? For all its wonder, the microchip is made up of metal, fire, crystal and water. During manufacturing, Malone notes a single speck of dust can mean disaster. In fact, he writes, the water used to rinse the surfaces of finished chips is more pure than water used for open heart surgery!

Past the fascinating introduction, readers will find a graphic photograph of just how many microchip-related items we could find in our homes if we tried. One family's home in San Anselmo, California is emptied, literally on the front lawn, and featured in a two-page layout with the home in the background and various

possessions, appliances and electronics, etc. are displayed on the lawn.

From Hong Kong, China to Bristol, Connecticut or from Rostov, Russia to Memphis, Tennessee, it doesn't really matter which country you choose or even what city or town -- you'd be hard-pressed to find a spot that the microchip hasn't touched.

In bold, dashing fashion, DIGITAL DAY takes the reader on a virtual tour<pun intended> of each place in rapid succession. The photographs are so clear, the captions so informative, you could easily lose hours poring through this book.

For instance, in Tokyo, Japan we discover there is a word for computer-crazed youths who can't get enough of technology: otaku. One photo features an otaku by the name of Masakazu Kobayashi, who clearly has his cyberlife wired to the max.

His microchip-driven bounty includes not one PC, but seven networked PCs, six video game systems, a palmtop, a laptop, and a motherlode of peripherals to boot.  Instead of having a room littered with comic books, magazines, CDs and other youth-driven materials,Kobayashi's room reeks of technology run amok.

But microchips and PCs aren't all for fun or convenience -- sometimes those thin slivered devices can mean the difference between life and death. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, DIGITAL DAY photos introduce the reader to new helmets worn by the city's firefighters.

These helmets, equipped with small digital video screens and infrared sensors, actually allow

firefighters to see through smoke.  When searching for victims amid smoke, unbearable heat and soaring flames, these helmets can mean saving lives instead of searching frantically in near-blinding conditions.

Worlds away, in South Africa, readers are captured in a surreal moment as a cheetah is scanned for identification purposes. Yes, scanners aren't just for groceries and department store purchases anymore!

More poignant, yet just as thrilling, is the photograph taken on Father's Day, 1997, of a young mother and her child making a video conference connection with the husband/father, a jubilant Army lieutenant stationed in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

Whether in the field of sports, business, science, health, or in your own backyard (situated in Bangor or Bangalore), this book makes clear through stunning, meticulous photographs,how microchips and technology coexist peacefully and practically amid our daily routine. 

At the end of DIGITAL DAY, readers will find a bonus in the section which introduces each of the book's photographers and offers a biography for each. It's rewarding not only to see the magnificent photos they've taken, it's equally as rewarding to read about the person, the artist, behind the photograph.

DIGITAL DAY is more than a dormant coffee table book. It's a book you'll find yourself going back to over and over -- and taking to work to show your friends. It's crisp, fresh, hip, blazing with color and vibrancy as this 24-hour microchip-laden tale is recounted for the reader.

If you're looking for a classy addition to your book collection that mixes modern tech with classic photography, DIGITAL DAY is the book for you.

The information and pictorial displays housed within make for a virtual feast that's fascinating, optically elegant and intellectually easy to digest.

Real miracle of microchips: What people do with them

I remember when my father first brought a handful of microprocessors home. He was the new engineer responsible for improving their production. They weren't attached to anything, just processors. Defective ones at that. At the dinner table, my father excitedly traced the circuitry paths through the bed on which the microchip -- the "brains" -- would lie, explaining to me just what it was a microprocessor did, from an engineering perspective.

And it was impressive. But it also seemed so right, so natural, so logical, so within the reach of the bright minds of science. Impressed, yes. But I was not awed.

I've always had great faith in the technological process, how things are accomplished. I find it interesting that a single microchip today can hold 20 million transistors. And I'm fully confident that the number will continue to rise until it runs smack into the laws of physical nature. So be it.

There are now 15 billion microchips in use today around the world. OK, that's interesting. But what does it mean?

Over this past weekend I learned the answer, or part of it.

It means that Army Lt. Frank Holmes, stationed in Sarajevo, Bosnia, can talk face to face with his wife, Amanda, and baby daughter, Morgan, 5,000 miles away at Fort Bragg, N.C.

It means that 320,000 itinerate and functionally illiterate pensioners in the KwaZulu region of South Africa will get their monthly checks because a computer can read their fingerprints.

It means that 5-year-old Amy Stewart, blind since birth, can keep up with other students in her first-grade class because a computer converts her lessons into Braille. It means that Sigrid Cerf was able to phone her husband and hear his voice for the first time in their 35-year marriage because research she conducted on the Internet led to a cure for the hearing ! impairment she's had since childhood. (Ironically, her husband is Vint Cerf. He co-wrote theTCP/IP protocol, earning the title "father" of the Internet.) It means that Mike Ward, an Intel engineer, was able to design a computer system that would enable him to continue working as his body gradually deteriorated from Lou Gehrig's disease.

See? This is what I get excited about. Not how a microchip works, but what it can do. And to what new uses our imaginations can put it. These examples and hundreds more are found in a new book that will be available May 28. It is called "One Digital Day: How the Microchip is Changing the World."

If you are familiar with Rick Smolan's hugely popular coffee-table books, the "Day in the Life" series, you'll grasp the nature of this one. Smolan's specialty is assembling hundreds of the best photographers in the world and throwing them at a single subject for one intense shutterbugging day. California, Japan, Hawaii, America, Vietnam have all been topics. Smolan sent 100 photojournalists out into the field for this one on July 11, 1997. Their objective was "to depict intimate and emotional stories of how this tiny chip -- a square of silicon the size of a fingernail, weighing less than a postage stamp -- has transformed our human culture forever.

And, yes, the project was underwritten by the largest maker of microprocessors in the world, Intel Corp., to celebrate its 30th birthday. But so what? In 30 years I've never heard a soul complain about the way Absolut Vodka has corrupted, commercialized and trivialized the art world with its "masterpiece" bottle ads.

"One Digital Day" is a brilliant illumination. It is both an explication and a justification of digital technology. The argument it presents, that our lives have been irrevocably changed by microprocessor technology is nearly impossible to refute.

Evidence? Check out Philip Quirk's photo of an aboriginal woman in ! the Australian Outback using a hand-held ATM machine. Or Lori Adamski-Peek's photo of an implant pump, smaller than a contact lens, that can dispense medication with precision.

One of the most celebrated of recent technological feats is featured: Sojourner, the 22-pound Mars rover with the ancient Intel 80c85 processor and 9,600 baud modem. This mighty little robot sent back spectacular pictures of the Mars terrain.

Anyone who insists that they have nothing to do with computers should take a close look at Peter J. Menzel's composition of a San Anselmo, Calif.,home. All of the products from within the house which run on microchips are spread across the front lawn. It is a very crowded front lawn. Menzel's photo is both whimsical and sobering.