Week Two, What the hell is Digital…?
After the first session we were set the task of preparing a presentation which answered the question digital is …? I had a very limited understanding of what the word digital ment i could list electronic devises, though couldnt actually define the word digital. 10011001001010 and on off came to mind, but this isnt a clean definition and i wasn’t entirely sure how they related to the word. I was curious to find out how much other people knew about digital, so asked a few people to give a brief description of what was supposedly digital. What was apparent was that people mainly associated the word with objects they knew to be digital.
‘ the internet, bus stop times, announcement boards. Calculations, accuracy, technology.’
The word analog also seemed to crop up a lot in peoples descriptions. If digital is an advance from analog then i needed to understand analog to appreciate what we have advanced from. I came across a nice metaphor which helped me to visualize more clearly the contrast between digital and analog. That being the difference between a record player and a CD player.
Record players work by having the needle run gently over the grooves of the record, which are imprinted on the vinyl. The vibrating needle reproduces the recorded sound. There are no gaps in the record when it is playing even when the record is blank. So its strange that people would describe digital as being more accurate and yet the record player which uses analog technology is realler in the sense that no information is lost, it is constantly providing a continuous signal. Differing from the CD player which provides a continuous signal but as a series of points of information. Rather than a needle reading the information on the compact disk a laser is focused onto the grooves, and is reflected back onto one of two sensors, creating a series of data points that are turned into music. Although it provides a clearer, crisper sound it is perhaps not as honest as that of a record player.
I started to categorise objects and things as either analog or digital and found out that the written language is considered to be digital. Thinks such as morse code, braille, smoke signals and in fact DNA are also categorised as digital. If DNA is digital and the way we communicate through written language is digital it led me to wonder what we are as humans whether we process the world around us digitally or analogically. When discussed with the group the general consensus was that humans were analog. If this is the case, then does submerging ourselves within a world where everything that surrounds us operates digitally mean that its harder for us to connect, on the same level as it is for us to connect with objects that operate analogicall? I spoke earlier about the music produced by a record player as being real and many would ague more soulful in comparison to a the sound produced from a CD playerwhich almost like an airbrushed photograph, information is lost to create a crisper more enhanced image which isnt as true to the object the picture it is taken of.
