Relevance of the term “digital”
Unless somebody has been hibernating or decided to live deep in the amazon basin for the last three decades they must have noticed the gradual encroachment of technology in all aspects of our life. Things were interesting enough in the late 70s and the early 80s with the first personal computers. The introduction of CDs for data and music led to the triumph of optical storage, and if predictions for holographic discs live up to technical and cost expectations we will be the owners of 12 cm (or smaller) discs for many years to come. With the arrival of miniDV, video recording has become higher quality and more reliable, so if any of you have old VHS tapes you better hurry to transfer them to your hard disc and DVD discs, before they are completely useless… Photography has followed a more conservative path but the last 5 years have seen cataclysmic changes. Chemical film development is now a process of the past and only a bunch of traditionalists would refuse to admit that CCD and CMOS sensors can do for them as much (or more) as film. The final factor that arrived to stitch everything together in an allpresent net is of course the internet that we all love. Communication? Interaction? Games? Business? It’s all there for everybody to read, hear, see and more importantly contribute!
Lots of innovations are much less obtrusive. Who has noticed that their car is equipped with ABS before their first emergency stop? Airbags? Their presence is declared by the small logo on the dashboard and (luckily) the majority of drivers will never get a taste of their effectiveness. The examples are countless. Radio and television broadcasts are the last two sectors that have resisted change so far. Sure there is satellite tv and internet radio, but most countries still retain analogue transmission infrastructures, a situation to change very very soon. The Netherlands have already stopped all analogue transmissions and the rest of the EU is to follow by 2012. Similarly for the US which is even more impatient to abandon old style terrestrial transmissions by 2009.
So what is the common denominator of all those developments? They are of course all digital. Even if I have not mentioned this word at all in the previous paragraphs, we all know what microprocessors has done for our life. As a result, I consider it as overkill for example to talk about digital music playback. Today, even the most old fashioned radio station plays music from CDs or a computer playlist and if they are clever they will have done a serious effort to preserve old recordings in optical media in order to retain the relative integrity of old archives. I could go on for ever, but the real truth is that digital is the state of technology today. Therefore, the pointless use of the word tends to make me feel uneasy even if I know it is part of a cheap marketing campaign. Let’s face it, the presence of the internet and all those wonderful machines surrounding us in their current state is not because most of us demanded it but a direct result of the relentless pace of development and the opening of new and convenient manners of communication and business. Who for example had imagined a site like youtube? Very very few people and those kept their mouths shut till launch. As more people enter the internet loop and experience the new possibilities it will be normal that demand will to some degree drive new developments. At the same time we will become a lot more careful on how much data we give away and how much surveillance we accept in public places or at our workplaces. But till this point is reached we will very likely be powerless to guarantee our privacy and have forgotten it is all digital…
