Geoff Duncan

Been thinking a bunch about the whole "digital convergence" thing lately, whereby digital media—video, images, music, text, etc.—is supposed to become ubiquitous throughout our lives. Broadband internet connections (wired and wireless) are supposed to let us access media from any location we choose, on any device we choose, at any time we choose. New disk formats and media centers are supposed to enable us to manage our media: store our favorite movies on a home server, pump them out to digital screens anywhere in the home or (wirelessly!) to a portable screen or immersive headset system out back in the hammock. Systems makers and content providers are incorporating rights management technologies, whereby (in theory) only users who have purchased appropriate licenses to content will be able to view it, and the famous digital capability of being able to perfectly replicate data will not result in material being misappropriated or in millions of pirated copies circulating around the globe.

Yeah sure.

And there are all sorts of new "convergence" products: media servers which handle your music, photos, movies, and record your television; mobile phones which double as GPS devices, personal jukeboxes, address books, and walkie-talkies; music players which store movies and television episodes; game systems which surf the net, manage your movies, photos, and music... the list is getting both longer and shorter at the same time—converging, if you will—as more products become available but have increasingly overlapping functions.

Watching all this, I keep having versions of the same thought. I'm what most people would consider a tech geek. I follow, research, and write about this stuff. In practice, I tend to be more aware of how these technologies work, how they're available, and how they're developed than most folks. And a lot of my work is in the media industry, so things like copyright, rights management, royalty systems, media quality, and specs matter to me.

And you know what: at a fundamental level, virtually none of this digital stuff appeals to me.

Some of it is a personal lifestyle choice. I mean, I'm perfectly happy with "time-shifting" television via a single tape in my VCR. If I'm trying to watch so much TV that being able to record five hours of shows doesn't let me keep up, then you know what? I'm watching too much TV. Simple as that. I don't have a cell phone, either: while I understand they're useful things and I like the idea of associating a phone number with a person rather than a room…you know what? I don't call a lot of people, and no one needs to talk to me that bad.

Part of it is that I'm becoming increasingly old school. I'll be the first to admit digital media has advantages in terms of portability, replication, conversion, management, and random access, and I'm more than happy to extol and leverage those virtues. But fundamentally, the only reason media has gone digital is that it's currently cheaper to do consumer-quality digital than consumer-quality analog. In the grand scheme of things, that's only been true for a few years, and I find myself hoping it's not true for long.

I've never subscribed to the calculus-approach to representation, which I'll sort of breeze over by describing digital systems as unable to capture a thing itself—whether an image, sound, or movie— so instead they slice it into smaller and smaller pieces which, when re-assembled in a particular fashion and order, perhaps fool our senses into perceiving something akin to the original.

But it's not the original. It's…well, it's a collection of numbers in a data format. It's fake. Bleh.

Most digital media is a perceptual trick. Remember when you were a kid, took a magnifying glass to a picture in a newspaper or magazine, and were amazed to find it was composed of thousands of little dots and splotches? But when you backed away or squinted, you saw a cohesive image? Digital media is the same thing, except the splotches are chunks of data which arbitrarily represent concepts like an amplitude or a color value. Digital media systems rely on these splotches being small enough that, individually, they fall beneath levels of human perception without having to squint. (Although, if you remember how early computer graphics looked "chunky," those squared-off edges were the data splotches themselves. In about two weeks that look will probably be retro chic so watch out.)

Here's my take, and it's kinda philosophical. Good quality analog media—film, tape, etc.—directly corresponds to the "real thing" while digital is just an arbitrary representational system. Expose film to light, the physical result is a direct product of those physical micro-moments in time. Record something to tape, the physical result is produced by sound over time. One could argue endlessly about the perceptual fidelity and overall quality of those analog results compared to the original. And arguing endlessly about the role of the author doing the recording is pretty much what most modern culture is about.

One might even argue that the analog media is an arbitrary, representational mechanism with no value unto itself, just like digital media. After all, digital might be a bunch of arbitrary binary data, but analog is just a collection of arbitrary charged or chemically altered particles, right?

Except…no, it's not. Analog media isn't arbitrary. I'm certainly not claiming its perfect or somehow "truer" than anything else, but analog media derives directly from physical laws, and its form is the direct result of physical events out here in the real world. Analog media works the way it does because it must, not because some multinational corporations sat down, argued, then agreed it would. Like the composition, shape, and location of a rock in a stream is the direct result of that stone's unique path in the world, analog media is a direct, unique result of events in time. You might pick up that stone, admire it, and put it in your pocket, thereby incorporating it into your life. You might even cherish it.

But digital…digital is just bits. Sure, those bits may exist at a physical level when burned to optical media or stored on a disk, but you don't care about them. The bits themselves aren't a thing which matters out here in the real word, only the things they claim to represent may matter. The bits themselves are just a fanciful agreement.

All these companies want to sell me bits.

I guess I'd rather have the stone.