An Analogue Brain in a digital world

by William Buist on June 29, 2010

What is Analogue and What is digital

Analogue signals vary infinitely (well in theory) and digital signals use discrete states (usually 1 or 0) to transmit information. Increasingly the world is becoming digital, Radio (DAB) TV (DVB) and the internet are all manifestations of the digital world. Yet our minds are analogue, and the interface is complicated. For television the digital signal transmits first broad sector information and then narrow sector changes, the signals been squeezed down to minimise the amount of data that needs to be transmitted and band width and conversion rates have been increased to the point where digital transmission was possible. The best is via fibre optic cable to minimise signal noise and over the air and via an aerial the worst. We've all seen the impact of a pixellated screen when the signal has degraded. Our memories don't do that -They degrade in different ways, and the recombine to reconstruct history - Digital recall is perfect recall, but analogue, human, recall is subjective and selective. The challenge is that humans are (self)selective. That means that we overlook trivial things our friends and contacts say and do that hurt us, pretty quickly usually. Digitally though those things are fixed. When we cause pain in the analogue brain through a digital medium we also create an endurance that doesn't match the evolutionary path that we have taken as a species

Are communities digital or analogue?

Communities are groups of people with shared methods, shared beliefs and shared support and shared place (read more here >). When that place is on-line there is an element of digital involved yet at the heart of it are people with an analogue approach. So, what is the impact? Well according to this article > Facebook is now a key witness in divorce proceedings. Digital evidence of an analogue affair. Not just the analogue affairs either - The article highlights :-
Consider, for example, the mom who lost custody of her kids because she was playing FarmVille or World of Warcraft when she claimed to be spending time with them, or the husband who denied anger management issues but flamed like a true troll, complete with violent threats, on his Facebook profile.
Digital evidence that never lies, never goes away, never reflects the context, and is ever present, causes analogue impacts that are complex and far reaching. Whilst togetherness on-line can help provide a glue for community, there are risks that the digital/analogue interface of on-line to real world could also damage the heart of community too. What does your analogue brain make of it?

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  • http://twitter.com/ajwilcox ajwilcox
    Analogue versus Digital = LP v CD = Large Black Disc v Small Silver Disc = Groove and Needle v Mirrors and Laser = Continuous v 44100 Hz Sample Quantised to 16 bits or 65,536 levels

    Digital to Analogue produces an acceptable conversion when the sample rate is at least twice the highest frequency of the source. It is impossible for Google to achieves this. What it has to sample is continuously changing and being added to. It is not the "simple" matter of converting a fixed audio track.

    Other analogies can be drawn with feedback and signal to noise ratios.

    For a community to approach analogue it needs a lot of content. To experience it properly you need to sample it at twice the frequency of new postings!

    If you flick through the LPs or CDs at the record shop you have not heard the music.
  • http://www.abelard-uk.com William Buist
    These are great thoughts Andrew and I like the grounding back to real engineering and theory that you provide here. I particularly like the thoughts about sampling more often than stuff is being added.

    That does imply that for a community to form in the analogue sense the volume of content already present must be quite big. Assuming 10 new posts a day that's 20 samples meaning existing content of over 3650 posts to allow a years sampling. Of course after year, for a new entrant they can sample for 2 years before exhausting the old content.

    I shall muse on this further.
  • Brian Freeston
    About this interface - for me the clearest example is in the appreciation of movies, shot either on film (celluloid/emulsion) or straight to hard drive (digital).
    In real life what we see is light reflected, and this comes to our eyes as chaotic information. Our brains have evolved over the millennia to make sense of this - to create order out of chaos.
    Yet when we look at films created purely in the digital domain this light comes to us in ordered square pixels and so the visual cortex is working to make order out of order.
    If the film is made on 35mm etc stock it is emulsion that captures the 'chaotic' light and keeps it chaotic for us to make sense of in the audience.
    Which is why we have a deep yet subtle difference in appreciation of these forms of visual capture.
    It's difficult to explain, but I generally feel more 'at home' with emulsion. It has a story-telling mystery to it that digital cannot match.
    Does that have a relevance to the whole analogue/digital divide?

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