Monday, September 17, 2012

For Those Who Were Sleeping: Justifications for the Digital Age


Somewhere, online or in print, at any given hour of the day on any one of the settled continents, there is a headline blaring the catchphrase “digital age” somewhere in its midst.  It’s a phrase that has already lost any sense of novelty in speaking it or writing it – it just seems to come with the territory, a distant piece of primeval etymology. To say, “Digital age!” almost anywhere on Earth would be the equivalent of saying, “Cars and trucks!” in the middle of a freeway traffic jam. Yes, we all know how “information” has become “digitized” to the nth degree. But what are the advantages of this means of record-keeping over, say, the libraries that civilization has painstakingly accumulated over the course of hundreds of years? What are the practical gains of being able to record sounds and images “digitally” as opposed to the analog formats we all grew up with?

Is this a case of technology taking over by sheer force of traction and advertising? Is the digital age a “necessary” age?

Well, the short answer is that like it or not, the digital age is upon us. For those who choose to ignore the implications of its technological achievements, they stand to lose out against those who have dedicated their lives and careers towards “mastering” the new formats.

Binary code enabled us to enter the 'Digital Age,'
by breaking everything down into bits from the blogs we read
to the pictures we send friends. 
But there’s a longer and more logical answer as well. The digital age has standardized the flow of many different types of information – telephone calls, photographs, television sets, libraries, billboard advertising, and advanced communication – into a single flowing river of zeroes and ones. The images you take (via digital camera or smartphone) of your friends and family on vacation in Brazil are formed of the same “bits” that comprise the online blogs you read while bored at work, back in your New York cubicle. Unlike the Eastman Kodak photo albums of just a few years back, these images are easily printable – and furthermore erasable. Likewise, the graphic quality of digital images far surpasses the finest film developing facilities that America ever produced. The 8-megapixel camera on a $99 smartphone already is capable of displaying graphic resolutions that the human eye, for all its sharpness, fails at discerning.

The digital age has done for information what the industrial revolution did for material parts: information that would have been hard to find 20 years ago is now easily replicable. You can now balance libraries more extensive than the Library of Congress in your lap as you sip your latte at the “bookstore.”

Just like any other major technological revolution in human history, the digital age has its detractors and naysayers. But it is here to stay for the foreseeable time being, and should be welcomed – at the very least – out of sheer necessity.

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