At TED Global last week I was speaking to a guy who was spending a considerable time understanding how to transfer his CD collection back onto Vinyl - a crazy thing some may say but for me it raised the issue of the digital/analogue debate - is one better than the other and if so why.
The argument he presented was that with analogue there are imperfections in the music - there is noise that is imperceptible to many but to him this 'noise' was important as it provided a human aspect to the music. Digital reproduction has become so good that it filtered out most of the human factor and the 'noise' that was there in the original and just created a 'perfect' version of the music.
Speaking to this guy got me thinking about whether this move from digital back to analogue was a potentially wider phenomena and - have we got too used to the digital aspects of our life and if we have what have we lost in this move - what are the human aspects of the world we have lost.
Is it time to re-introduce 'noise' into our increasingly digitally perfect world?
At TED we heard from a range of speakers on very diverse topics and this idea of the move to analogue kept coming through in a number of presentations - the group who are mimicking the brain with a number of parallel processes which rather than throw pure horsepower at the problem are mimicking the way neurons work to create, at some time in the future, a sentient thing (I won't call it a being at this stage!). Or the Cynetics guy who is using sound to create patterns and then look at how these could be used in a practical sense, the proposal to build a wall of sand dunes across the Sahara desert to stop erosion and create habitats - none of these are 'digital' in the way we understand it rely on analogue forms of design and interpretation.
The other thing I did whilst I was at the conference was to try and count the number of digital watches that people wore. If I went back 5 years there would have been a majority of people with them, however at the conference I guess that over 70% wore analogue watches. Now I know that this could be a style thing or a design thing, but my own view is that it is easier to read - we find the analogue face easier to interpret than the numbers - we like fuzziness.
I would be interested in your views.
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