mooger foogin' waste of digital time
so i've been thinkin' a little about this whole digital revolution thing. not that there's much to think about or make a great deal of.. don't wanna be seen as some smart arse academic do we?
well, now that we've established where i stand in the intellectual food chain, the digital revolution is really quite something else. what is the digital revolution you might as? well, for me it really is the sharing of data that can be interpretated by computers.
slowly, many things around us get sampled or 'digitised' into 1's and 0's. say we were talking on the phone, usually the sound produced by our voices get converted into electrical impulses and find their way via telephone cables to the other party, or maybe converted to radio waves and then decoded on the recieving end. these days, it's not too hard to imagine that because of various microchips in telecommunications devices, such audio signals get sampled into a digital stream and is transfered from sender to reciever via fibre optics, decoded on the recieving end into a language that we all understand, be that an aural, visual and physical stimulant.
it really is nothing new, since our internal organs communicate with each other in much the same way, via electric impulses and a fantastic nervous system. all these different parts working together, integrating and communicating with each other to form one, which really is a multiple you.
i'll always remember asking a friend of mine, what the next level in computer gaming, and without even batting an eyelid, he said "virtual reality". and it really all came together then. i mean, once we can sample every aspect of 'this' reality, we can start to create a virtual one that interacts with all our five senses. once our minds start integrating with each other, we will all start to perform different functions for the same purpose.. thus our consciousness will all slowly become 'one' as well. we could share memories and experiences. not just by appealing to our five senses, but much like a computer shares data with each other, given the relevant cybernatics, shared memories and such virtual realities really isn't so hard to imagine.
when we think about how we share information on the internet today, it really is a taste of things to come. buying my lomo means i take things back a notch, i have to chemically process the film before i can develop a print, a physical print before i can share it with anyone. i can share it by making more prints and distributing it, or by putting it up on a common area where anyone can look at it. however, you can already see the physical limitations imposed. sharing such information is constrained by me actually physically giving you the file, and if it is displayed in a public place, how can you interact with it if you're not allowed to take it?
however, if i were to scan the picture, you could digitally manipulate it, or send exact digital replicas for others to enjoy. although perfect digital replica is a sort of oxymoron. the limit of the digital, is that it can only exist in the virtual, within the universe of a computer's processing power. what of an artificial intelligence then? i daren't think of the further possibilities.
video technology is going to be a big thing in the future. real time sharing of information.. based on what the video cameras can see, i can transmit images to you in real time for you to see what i see. it no longer needs to be developed, editied, put together. no.. with enough successful integration, video technology can lead the way into a much smaller world, a more integrated whole, or it can fracture as well.. based on the multitude of channels we're going to find in the future.
so all in all, thanks for hearing me out. we're all hopelessly plugged in.
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