As software developers, we
tend to think in terms of the digital, and to see the world as digital.
But not all the world is digitized yet, apparently. Tomi Ahonen,
co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, in some predictions for 2008,
outlines the half of life that already is.
“My point is that digitalization is spreading and has
not even reached half point in its total spread into our lives. Already
today we find farmers who manage their cows via GPS/GSM
chips; we have pets that can be tracked with location-based collars;
and forests in Finland are managed by which every tree is individually
tagged with a GPS/GSM gadget.
“Any business, any part of life, will be hit by
digitalization, TV is going digital, radio is going digital, movies are
going digital, etc. The future impacts of digitalization are greater
than the past disruptions have been so far.” – Ten Related Trends for 2008
The advantages of digital over analog
largely lie in the areas of distribution. As we all know, digital
information can be endlessly replicated with no loss of data. The
downside of digital lies in the loss of subtleties that analogs of
reality capture: digital is not a direct impression, merely a
representation.
However, the representation of information
in digital form is often all that is needed in any circumstance to
process choice and make decisions.
“Through the use of thumbnail images, which do not
require high resolution, one can at a minimum acquaint oneself with the
source enough to know whether or not one needs to consult the original.
Very often one can make do with the digital surrogate because it
provides all the information required.” – Why Digitize?
The quote above from an article published by
the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in 1999 points
to this revolutionary liberating of information that occurs with
digitization, in a section subtitled, appropriately enough,
“Digitization is Access – Lots of It”.
The digitization of
knowledge has started a revolution that may not be fully appreciated by
any of us even now, perhaps. The physical archiving of analogically
impressed media created a necessary structure of category, which
appears now to be yielding to uncategorized meta data, as search becomes
the file system, and the shelf disappears.
A brilliant presentation of this is given in cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch’s video clip, entitled Information R/evolution. The five-minute clip illustrates the rise of digital, tagged information.
Regular readers of this blog will know that we gripe about the
emergence of the podcast as being a reversion to primitive analog
times, the worst of both worlds: although the spoken voice is digital,
no text transcription is created, and the salient feature of
digitization – rapidly scanable access – is lost.
“Ironically, as digital technology allows
increasingly more people to work from home, only the remaining
commuters in their cars have the time to listen to a podcast.” – Knowledge Connections
