DIGITALIZATION AND THE ANALOGUE MEDIA

People need first of all to think about why new media are described as digital in the first place – what does ‘digital’ actually mean in this context? In addressing this question we will have cause to define digital media against a very long history of analogue media. This will bring us to a second question. What does the shift from analogue to digital signify for producers, audiences and theorists of new media? In a digital media process all input data are converted into numbers.

In terms of communication and representational media this ‘data’ usually takes the form of qualities such as light or sound or represented space which have already been coded into a ‘cultural form’ (actually ‘analogues’), such as written text, graphs and diagrams, photographs, recorded moving images, etc. These are then processed and stored as numbers and can be output in that form from online sources, digital disks, or memory drives to be decoded and received as screen displays, dispatched again through telecommunications networks, or output as ‘hard copy’. This is in marked contrast to analogue media where all input data is converted into another physical object. ‘Analogue’ refers to the way that the input data (reflected light from a textured surface, the live sound of someone singing, the inscribed marks of someone.

The question of determination (technological or other) is a more complex question, and is dealt with in handwriting) and the coded media product (the grooves on a vinyl disc or the distribution of magnetic particles on a tape) stand in an analogous relation to one another.
Analogues ‘Analogue’ refers to processes in which one set of physical properties can be stored in another ‘analogous’ physical form.

The latter is then subjected to technological and cultural coding that allows the original properties to be, as it were, reconstituted for the audience. They use their skills at e.g. watching movies to ‘see’ the ‘reality’ through the analogies. Analogos was the Greek term which described an equality of ratio or proportion in mathematics, a transferable similarity that by linguistic extension comes to mean a comparable arrangement of parts, a similar ratio or pattern, available to a reader through a series of transcriptions. Each of these transcriptions involves the creation of a new object that is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Analogue media, mass production and broadcasting The major media of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (prints, photographs, films and newspapers) were the products not only of analogue processes but also of technologies of mass production. For this reason, these traditional mass media took the form of industrially mass-produced physical artefacts which circulated the world as copies and commodities. With the development of broadcast media, the distribution and circulation of such media as physical objects began to diminish.

In broadcast media the physical analogue properties of image and sound media are converted into further analogues. These are wave forms of differing lengths and intensities which are encoded as the variable voltage of transmission signals. In live broadcast media such as pre-video television or radio there was a direct conversion of events and scenes into such electronic analogues.

This electronic conversion and transmission (broadcast) of media like film, which is a physical analogue, suggests that digital media technologies do not represent a complete break with traditional analogue media. Rather, they can be seen as a continuation and extension of a principle or technique that was already in place; that is to say, the principle of conversion from physical artefact to signal. However, the scale and nature of this extension are so significant that we might well experience it not as a continuation but as a complete break.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686