Analogue Man with Digital Plan
This and the pages that follow have unashamedly a TL;DR badge at its front door so if you don’t want to do a slightly deeper dive into exploring how the digital world is influencing what we can do — and what we are doing to ourselves — then it probably isn’t for you. But otherwise jump right in.
Def (Technology & Electronics): Analogue (Analog)
Analogue signals are continuous signals that vary over time. They represent data using a range of values rather than discrete steps.
Information (input) with infinite possible values
Information (input) subject to noise and distortion
Output proportional to input
Def: Digital
Digital signals are non continuous over time, i.e. they are on or off
Information (input) with finite possible states (0 and 1)
Information (input) with more immunity to noise
Output is based on SAMPLES of an input
Humans are analogue creatures with our biological processes depending on continuous electrical and chemical gradients without which our hearts wouldn’t beat, and our brains and nerves couldn’t function, and our hormone levels, body temperature and other physiological processes couldn’t adapt or change fluidly in the way we take so much for granted as we just get on with this thing we call life.
We also perceive things in analogue ways. We see light and colours as continuous spectrums where colors blend seamlessly into one another. We hear sound as continuous waves. Our ears interpret these waves as nuanced tones, pitches, and intensities. And we experience touch and temperature as finely-tuned gradients and not just on or off data points. So we can detect a broad range of pressures, temperatures, and textures. We communicate in analogue ways. Our speech and handwriting are analogue in nature, varying in tone, pitch, and flow, rather than being inherently binary or discrete.
We live in an analogue world in which our environment and the other creatures in it also behave and sense in analogue ways.
But then we invented digital. {cue dark music or dark-trap beat here 😀}
Digital technology SAMPLES our complex analogue world and abstracts it into discrete measurable units (on or off, 0 or 1). In the process of doing so it simplifies the complexity of our natural world gradients with their infinite data points. So our sound and images are sampled and become on or off units in a sequence which can then be reconstructed as a representation of the original (note emphasis). The quality of the reconstruction is dependent on how frequently the original analogue subject, e.g. a painting, or a sound, was sampled. Fewer samples means less data for the reconstruction to represent the original resulting in, for example, a poor quality audio track, or a pixellated image. More samples means it can become difficult to differentiate between the original and the sampled representation.
Our analogue brains, however, are also pretty good at compensating for missing information for we analogue beings are also samplers. For if we did not learn to be efficient samplers and interpreters of our analogue world then there is much that can harm us. Much of the time via our senses we are both consciously and unconsciously sampling and interpreting the environment around us, e.g. sound, vision, heat, touch, pressure. Much of this sampling takes place without our conscious attention and indeed strong distractors for our attention may become powerful impediments to our sampling or interpretations of said samples with potentially detrimental physical or social consequences. Such impediments have a name, i.e. inattentional deafness or blindness. Impediments arising it seems from what we call attention being a relatively narrow and limited part of our consciousness upon which various stimuli (signals) must gain focus before we can fully engage with something. Once fully engaged, however, other stimuli that come knocking on the attention door may or may not be admitted. Not too much of a problem in some contexts. Corrosive or even disasterous in others; of which we will consider more later.
Inattentional Blindness & Deafness (AI generated image)
So in our gravitation to digital technologies it actually reflects what we analogue samplers do anyway. We end up in the ironical position (from this sampling perspective only) of mashing up the technical (see above) and non-technical definitions of analogue (analog) with the latter being: “a person or thing seen as comparable to another” in proposing the slightly tongue in cheek — “digital is analogous to analogue” but with the rider being “in one way only, i.e. sampling”. But is probably sensible that we don’t mix such technical and non-technical definitions in the real world — for there lies confusion.
So for good or ill digital is increasingly representing, codifying, and measuring our lives, e.g. social media, wearable trackers. It is taking our social complexity and identities and reformulating them as data, e.g. profiles, usernames, connections, likes, emojis, thoughts, opinions, and followers. Human identity becoming a data abstraction fed to others for their consumption and feeding back into our understanding of self.
Abstracted Identities (AI generated image)
Digital is precise and efficient. It works or it does not. It lacks the imperfections, unpredictability and naunce of the analogue world which gave it life; for it has sampled what it needs to reconstruct its representation of what it was presented with to sample. Yet it is this very efficiency that is the problem as we humans increasingly depend on digital systems to interpret and guide and sometimes take over the analogue realities of our life. Viewed optimistically digital should be enhancing our analogue human natures, capabilities, and experiences. But yet does it? Or does it provide and present a compressed version and reduced experience of what was once there? As what we analogue beings created subtly reshapes our consciousness while hiding behind its curtain of efficiency?
In the pages which follow we explore some examples of how the digital world has influenced our thinking and behaviour. Not always positively.
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