Define “Digital”

What is “Digital”?

While the term digital is thrown around all the time, you would probably be hard-pressed to rigidly define it. We conducted an experiment like this in class, and it went roughly as follows:

“Digital is any technology!” I shout with excitement and pride. Wrong; technology encompasses any human-made tool.

“Digital is binary code!” someone else says with mild hesitation. Wrong; in theory, you can use your fingers to speak binary.

“Digital is data.” Wrong. This process continued until all our pride was shattered and our brains were leaking out of our ears. Frustrated and defeated, we agreed on a singular definition: “Digital is anything that operates on an internal CPU.”

Recovering with Eyman

When first reading Eymans Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric, I still found myself confused, if I am being completely honest. When he said, “In technical terms, digital systems are made up of discrete values, whereas analog systems feature a continuous range of values, often represented as a wave (Horak, 2007),” I was completely lost and reminiscing about my time in class. I mean, he could have been speaking Latin, and there would have been a higher likelihood of me understanding him. But then I remembered one of the analogies from class. The second hand on a clock is constantly in motion, not jumping from one to the next like a digital clock.

Continuing through the article, I saw plenty more aspects we touched on, like Morse code and fingers. Then things started to click into place. For something to exist in the digital realm, it has to be rigid and specific. No matter what is displayed, it will exist in isolation and reason. No matter how specific you get, it will always be due to specific programming. While I understand if I just overcomplicated that concept, because it feels like I have, consider the following:

Your computer has a clock, and if it doesn’t, we will pretend it does. It will show any metric of time you want it to, down to the nanosecond, if you want it to. Despite this level of detail, there is always a space between the changing of the digits, not shown by the display. The movement staggers.

Now let’s run the same test on an analog clock. For the sake of argument, it will also be a clock that has the nanoseconds marked, so it’s probably a giant clock. This time, you can always see the shift from second to second; it’s all accounted for. This is because analog technology offers a range of motion as opposed to the staggered nature of digital technology.

Digital v. Analog

So what does this mean for writers?

TL;DR: We, as writers, need to adapt to this new digital space. By understanding the mechanisms and limitations of digital space, we will improve our skills. We will change how we write. We will change where we write. And we can even learn to integrate the limitations of the medium into our writing.