The popular opposition between “analog” and “digital,” to put it in a nutshell, is wrong.
Two essays in the Digital Keywords volume—Jonathan Sterne’s “Analog” and my own “Digital”—frame this fundamental point: the analog and the digital are not a pair (itself a rehearsal of that tired digital binary, 0 and 1). Nor are they necessarily separate. Neither mutually exclusive nor embedded, digital and analog techniques should be understood by and independent of their fundamental non-relation. The digital is no simple realm of artificial and discrete symbols nor is the analog everything made of natural and continuous real waves, and certainly is the analog no opposite of digital. For Sterne, the analog is both narrower than we thought, compatible with, and subsequent to the digital. For me, the digital has roots in the extension of human hands.
When we talk about the digital, the analog, or other technical processes, are we sure we know what we are talking about? What, if anything, might these two essays have to offer the conversation?
This comment may have been adapted from the introduction to Benjamin Peters’ Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture. 25% discount code in 2016: P06197
Excerpted from Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture by Benjamin J. Peters, ed. © 2016 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
Cross-posted at Princeton University Press.