Distraction Culture: Thanks Tom

November 2005

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Tom - your comments on the previous post are good. So I need to exan d this argument.....

The reduction of everything to strings of digits is at the heart of the issue. I believe it is a property of digital that it has an inherent tendency to strip out context wherever it can. Why is this?

One set of reasons lie around bandwidth and capacity. There is a finite amount of storage space on devices – that is PC’s, storage media (zip drives, CD’s, smartmedia etc). Bandwidth, which is the capacity of wired or wireless connections to stream data from one place to another at any given moment, has also usually been scarce compared to demand. A bit like the M25 motorway, whenever another lane is added, we invent ways to fill it.

The answer has been compression technology. This takes the strings of zeroes and ones, and cuts out the unwanted bits which make no difference to your enjoyment of the content when you come to consume it. Again no argument that it’s a great invention which allows huge quantities of stuff to be digitised, copied and distributed at speed.

The second bundle of reasons is that digital things tend to remain precisely what they are and no more. Time and place have almost no effect on them. They pick up little on their travels across networks, do not decay, are not smelly – in short are differentiated from the outside usually by file names or numbers. The result is that at its worst, which is the norm, digital content lacks charm, magic and depth. In fact digital things usually only appeal to one or at best two senses, constrained as they are by the ability of technology (so far) to replicate taste, touch and smell.

Thirdly the digital world, at least in theory, allows a very high degree of precision for locating things. A web site address takes you straight to the place you wish to be. If you don’t know it, you can Google it. OK – so search engines don’t always deliver terrific results, but considering the scale of the challenge they are remarkably accurate. Today Google claims that it searches billions of web pages. I’m glad not to be doing this in an archive of 8 billion sheets of paper. Additionally the technology allows users to create precise pointers to things in lots of ways. On your PC you can do this with the command ‘Create Shortcut’, or for a Mac user ‘Make Alias’. Web links are pointers. So are the telephone numbers stored in your phone’s address book. Paradoxically digital both de-emphasises context and makes it easier to connect to other things.

Lastly, digital technology makes it very easy to copy things, because all the technology has to do is to replicate the content (zeroes and ones) exactly. This has lots of effects. It is a nightmare for the music and film industries with which they are still grappling. The flip side is that it has fuelled the phenomenon known as peer to peer file sharing. It allows anyone with a PC to cut and paste, and they do. An interesting news item can be shared with friends and colleagues in ten or so key strokes and mouse clicks. (Frequently it loses the context of the web site from which it was taken, even though it may be useful to have the context that an article comes from a trusted source, for example, the BBC.) Many content web sites have embraced this issue by adding the functionality to allow users to send their content to others – usually it’s a link. Of course they have done this as a form of viral marketing for their wares, and a link, if pursued, takes the user to the source where at least the context is fuller. In addition, because a digital copy is always identical to the original, digital artefacts rarely feel unique.

Comments

So going digital removes context through compression, remaining static, improves precision and eases replication. I wouldn't disagree with you on any of these considerations.

My point is that your (excellent) example of analogue media adding value through context (smelling paper to detect disease) is an incredibly niche use of context in analogue media. It's one that a few people will care about greatly, but which has no impact at all for most of us.

For the vast majority of folks, the advantages of digital (which you list in this post) massively outweigh the niche advantages of analogue - which is not to say that the latter don't exist and aren't *extremely* important to a tiny segment of the population...

...In much the same way that LPs are better than CDs because the artwork is bigger. Sure, that's true - and for folks (myself included) who've invested in vinyl in the past, that's more than a trivial concern. But for people who've never known better? Well The Kids snigger at anyone who buys CDs these days, never mind LPs.

Another analogy: to me, the fact that when growing up I had to be in a certain room of my home to speak on the telephone is one I remember, but it seems kind of quaint (even though it may have had advantages of privacy and control over interruptions). But to the generations that follow, it's just plain bizarre - and I'm sure they'll have trouble seeing how the few advantages of this situation compensate for the disadvantages.

Posted by: Tom Hume | November 05, 2005 at 01:11 AM