Andrew Lippman is a senior research scientist at MIT and associate director of the Media Lab. He has been with the Lab since its inception. Lippman’s work here has ranged from digital video and HDTV to graphical interfaces and networking. He heads the Lab's Viral Communications research group, which examines scalable, real-time systems whose capacity increases with the number of members. This new approach to communications, human transactions, and broadcasting migrates "mainframe communications" technology to distributed, personally defined, cooperative communicators.