THE DIGITAL MEDIA

Digital media can be defined as; the process the physical properties of the input data, light and sound waves, are not converted into another object but into numbers; that is, into abstract symbols rather than analogous objects and physical surfaces. Hence, media processes are brought into the symbolic realm of mathematics rather than physics or chemistry.

Once coded numerically, the input data in a digital media production can immediately be subjected to the mathematical processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division through algorithms contained within software. It is often mistakenly assumed that ‘digital’ means the conversion of physical data into binary information. In fact, digital merely signifies the assignation of numerical values to phenomena.

The numerical values could be in the decimal (0–9) system; each component in the system would then have to recognise ten values or states (0–9). If, however, these numerical values are converted to binary numbers (0 and 1) then each component only has to recognise two states, on or off, current or no current, zero or one. Hence all input values are converted to binary numbers because it makes the design and use of the pulse recognition components that are the computer so much easier and cheaper.

This principle of converting all data into enormous strings of on/off pulses itself has a history. It is traced by some commentators from the late seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz, through the nineteenth-century mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage, to be formulated seminally by Alan Turing in the late 1930s (Mayer 1999). The principle of binary digitality was long foreseen and sought out for a variety of different reasons. However, without the rapid developments in electronic engineering begun during the Second World War it would have remained a mathematical principle – an idea.

Certainly, once the twin engineering goals of miniaturisation and data compression had combined with the principle of encoding data in a digital form massive amounts of data could be stored and manipulated. In the last decades of the twentieth century the digital encoding of data moved out from the laboratories of scientific, military and corporate establishments (during the mainframe years) to be applied to communications and entertainment media. As specialist software, accessible machines and memory-intensive hardware became available, first text and then sound, graphics and images became encodable.

The process swiftly spread throughout the analogue domain, allowing the conversion of analogue media texts to digital bit streams. The principle and practice of digitisation is important since it allows us to understand how the multiple operations involved in the production of media texts are released from existing only in the material realm of physics, chemistry and engineering and shift into a symbolic computational realm.

The fundamental consequences of this shift are that:

• Media texts are ‘dematerialised’ in the sense that they are separated from their physical form as photographic print, book, roll of film, etc.(‘Digital processes and the material world’ for an account of why this does not mean that digital media are ‘immaterial’.)

• Data can be compressed into very small spaces;

• It can be accessed at very high speeds and in non-linear ways;

• It can be manipulated far more easily than analogue forms.

The scale of this quantitative shift in data storage, access and manipulation is such that it has been experienced as a qualitative change in the production, form, reception and use of media.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686