Not Just 1s and 0s
Close your eyes. When you hear the word: Digital, what do you see in your head? Computers? A digital clock? In Eyman’s text, “Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric,” digital systems go far beyond 1’s and 0’s and trace back much further than modern technology. According to Eyman, “any system made up of individual elements satisfies the technical definition.” So, the Braille alphabet is also a digitalized system. The word digital comes from the Latin digitus, meaning “fingers” or “toes.” The earliest forms of writing, like hieroglyphics, mentioned in the text, were written by hand. These “codes” of writing have evolved from carving hieroglyphs into stone to typing this blog post on my computer, still with ✨fingers.✨ Communication and the intentional construction of language have always been digital.
Repost ↺
Eyman argues that digital work can be “rearticulated, reshaped, or recreated as (nearly) perfect copies.” In the modern age, I immediately thought of TikTok, trends, stitches, and reposts. Trends take an original idea, sound, or song and, within a trend, often take on a new meaning, rearticulating the work. Thousands of other people then recreate the trend in nearly the exact same way. Another rearticulation allowed through this medium is the use of stitching other videos. This way, in accordance with Eyman, takes bits of an original video and reconstructs it with a new meaning by including another user’s addition to the original. Then we have reposts. With reposts, users do not even have to make their own video. With a click of a button, the video is copied and posted to their profile. So while digital systems and media are not just the new technological uses we have today, it is interesting to look at how far it has come. To “rearticulate, reshape, or recreate” this information, we are still using our fingers to communicate.
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