Are you digital?

 

Mike Wazowski is digital, he is made of nano-blocks. The more blocks we use, the closer he gets to the ‘real’ smooth Mike Wazowski.

We used to record music using a big horn (ehem!) which focused the vibrations of the smooth sound waves onto a needle which cut a groove of varying depth in a wax disk. This was ‘analog’ recording where the shape of the grooves is analogous to the shape of the sound-waves of the music. Because of the mechanics of the process, the recordings were never truly faithful to the original.

A digital recording can get very close to the smooth sound-wave patterns by using lots of bits (building blocks) of information. The more bits it uses, the closer it gets to the analog original and so the more faithful is the recording. We have now got to the point where we can use enough bits to make the recording indistinguishable from the original to the human ear.

Digital technology has rapidly become our favoured method of representing the real world, so whilst the real world is an analog world, we have started to think of the world we have designed – which is the world we increasingly inhabit - as a digital world.

The analog world is evolved, female, and yin; whist the digital world is designed male, and yang.