The Difference Between Analog and Digital Media

Abstract: In an information-rich society we're inundated through both the five senses and words.  Yet, they communicate differently.   For those who've been strongly influenced by academe, wordsespecially words devoid of personal, sensory experienceare highly valued.  Yet, communication through the five senses is more innate to our species.  What's the difference, and where are the advantages?

How Words Mean
     The written word appears to raised to an extremely high level of respect in Western culture.  It is regarded as sacrosanct and preferred by academics, and often seems to be held in higher esteem than the spoken word in business. In scientific communities, the publication of a formal (written) "paper" is the mark of significance, while shared personal experiences are denigrated as being less significant. Witness the wrath of those dedicated to the written word when a scientist or experimenter deigns to announce some result in public, before publication of the formal "paper."  And, in business, we want "the documentation," the paperwork, the written memo.
     On the other hand, scientific communities still conduct meetings which emphasize personal, spoken exchanges of information.  And in business, we spend what seem to be interminable hours in face-to-face meetings.  There is something special about these interpersonal events.  It is in these dynamic, unpredictable environments where the seeds of new ideas are often synthesized, and the more obvious flaws of early ideas are exposed.
     The emergence of high-technology tools that facilitate communication is just in its infancy. Although the telephone is ubiquitous, the emergence of facsimile and e-mail and discussion databases are beginning to shape the ways we transact business.  But our personal communications skills have been honed by millennia of transactions through the spoken word and, more recently, the supposed "objectivity" of the written word.
     The difference between the two is simple: The incorporation of sensory information. In the examples, additional information was added through tonality, context, relationship, and the meaning becomes something more than (or other than) the apparent words. This is Gregory Bateson's meta-communication:   That part of the message that tells us how to interpret the rest of the message. Without meta-communication, we are left to fall back on the interpretive devices that comes from our own experience...and that may be significantly different from the intent of the originator of the message.

Sensory Precision
     Sensory information and meta-communication are similar, but not quite identical.  In the written word, sensory information is often carefully inserted to help a reader arrive at the some conclusion the writer intends.  Good scientific papers are said to explain reproducible results; in order for those results to be reproduced, sufficient detail must be provided to allow the reader to independently duplicate the work.  That detail is inevitably provided in terms that are grounded in the five senses: We call for "5 mg Sodium Chloride," not "a pinch of Salt".  The latter is reserved for a recipe, where the artistry is in the reader's interpretation.
     The phrase "5 mg" is sensory-grounded.  It is a reference to a previously agreed-upon specification of volume.  You can imagine a 5 mg container in your mind's eye, or you can pick up a physical container that is graduated to that precision, but there is no mistaking the amount.  Similarly, the precision of "Sodium Chloride" is clear:  It's a specific "salt" that any competent scientist can imagine, say, as a molecular structure or recall as a list of known properties.  Now there are more refinements of each (for example the tolerance in the volume (plus-or-minus 1 mg?  0.001 mg) or the purity (99.999% pure NaCl) you could add to be even more precise...but these, too, are quantities we can measure with our five senses.

How We "Make Sense"
     That's a very provocative expression:  To "make sense" of something literally means that we can convert the symbols we see or hear into internal sensory experiences we can see, hear, feel, taste or smell.  We literally "make sense" of the stimuli we receive.
     Numbers and words are symbols that stand for some meaning that two commicators must agree upon.  If I utter a word for which you cannot create a representation in your mind, I am "not making sense."
"Ohaio gozaimasu."
If you speak Japanese, you'll recognize the familiar greeting, "Good morning."  And, if you don't, it didn't "make sense" to you.
     Because that interpretation is personal and unique, we use even more words in attempts to influence it.  For example, as you read the following words, you brain has to make the image to interpret the words; note the experience you have of "a green-and-blue elephant."   And, I'll bet your elephant is oriented a different direction, has a different size and is at a distance from you in your mind's eye that are different from mine as I wrote them.  If I were to attempt to describe exactly what sort of picture I have in my head it would likely take a few thousand words...and there's still no certainty that you'd be able to remember it all and construct the same image.
     If something we perceive doesn't "make sense" we have the option of seeking more precision, for example, by asking a clarifying question.   In clear public presentations, it is considered the mark of success when questions are not necessary.  Inevitably, when questions prove unnecessary, you can look back over a spoken pattern that was rich in sensory-grounded symbols.  On the other hand, in some kinds of communication, it's important leave lots of room for personal interpretation; it the tactic of effective sales people, influential politicians, powerful managers.  The ability to elect to communicate with precision, to direct the audience's experience explicitly, or to communicate leaving lots of room for interpretation is an important skill; both are matched halves of the entire skill.

An Even Finer Distinction
     There's another way to distinguish between the sensory and the symbolic worlds:  It is the difference between digital and analog communications.  In the digital world of representation, the meanings and interpretations are derived from discrete symbols, while in the analog, meanings and interpretations are derived from continuously-variable properties of one thing that stands for (i.e., is symbolic of) another.
Digital Information
     In modern digital computers, a binary digit is either "0" or "1", and there are no valid values but those two legitimate values; the size of the container for that bit is irrelevant to its meaning or interpretation.  Making 0's and 1's bigger doesn't change the meaning one whit to a computer.  Changing the way a word is represented does not change it's value: A dog is still a DOG is still a DOG, irrespective of how the symbol is represented.
     This is the essence of a digital symbol:  The digit or character or word is a symbol that stands for the thing itself.  It's an efficient way to encode information, but it strips away certain information (for example, we don't write "carb" for a "car that is blue" and "carr" for a "car that is red").
     The digits and characters of our language are arbitrary symbols that are combined to form numbers and words.  If you doubt they're arbitrary, consider Russian; and, in the more generalized sense, the symbols that stand for words or concepts in ideographic languages like Chinese are also digital.
Analog Information
     Duration, loudness and tonality are examples of ways to represent analog information in speech:  There is a relationship between the thing being represented (e.g., an emotional state) and the symbol we use to convey it.  A good example of an analogy is the volume control on your stereo or radio:   The movement of the knob (rotation) or the slider (distance) is the analog of the desired volume at which we wish to hear.
     Analog information is conveyed in our five senses:  We can hear sounds softer or louder, rhythms as lower or faster; we can see things dimmer or brighter...we even see the sky as "blue" or "bluer."  When changing some characteristic that stands for another characteristic causes changes in both, we're dealing with analog information.
     In an analog computer, the value of a measurement is continuously variable, a voltage that is in the range from (say) zero through +5 volts, with infinitely many possible values between those two limits.  Similarly, changing the infinitely-variable tonality over an uttered sentence can change its meaning, and the degree of change in tonality in some sense conveys some analogous kind of meaning (we shout in an emergency, for example).

Advantages
     As a species, we've grown up with analog information; it's intrinsic to our natures.  That's the advantage of analogic communication:  It works with everybody.  As an infant, your full-time job was to explore and expand your senses.  And some of us grew up being more sensitive to sounds than sights, or touch than smell; we're all different, and we've collected an absolutely unique set of experiences that are all encoded in the five senses.
     The main advantage of analogic communication is it's universality:  Sneak up behind a Kalahari bushman (if you can) and shout, you'll elicit a reaction, just as you would a pedestrian on a New York street.
     As an advanced civilization, most of us learn to read and numerate; to recognize and process digital information, and to use it to communicate.   It took you a few years to get through "Dick and Jane," or "Green Eggs and Ham;" it's an acquired skill.
     Words are "anchors" that haul up specific experiences:  If I write of "a big, mean dog," you probably have a real (or vicarious, such as television) experience that you recall that's connected to those words.   And that's their power:  A short analog (visually seeing the words, or hearing them spoken) experience of a digital symbol (i.e. word) retrieves a relevant, but hopelessly generalized experience.  It a great and efficient way to encode information:  Put on disk, the book "Gone With the Wind" would require fewer bits of information than the film made from the book.  Which medium represents the richer experience is largely dictated by your experience in synthesizing your subjective, internal experience from words:  Some people prefer their own experience ("the book was better"), while others prefer the film, which makes fewer intelle
Medium Effectiveness
     It has been demonstrated1 in a series of experiments that 78% of our communication is non-verbal (i.e., analog).
     What's even more significant, however, is that we're so accustomed to receiving and responding to non-verbal messages, that most of them occur outside our conscious awareness.  Effective communicators use those unconscious responses to elicit the behaviors they want from the audience.  Listen to a good orator, a dynamic evangelist, a terrific comedian; their power comes from their use of the analogic properties of language.

Coping with Digital Media
     The difficulty in the domain of the written word is the incorporation of that sensory-based meta-communication. In computer-mediated communications, like e-mail, bulletin board systems, shared text files and discussion databases, there are evolving customs and rituals.  People who regularly communicate through computers find that the paucity of meta-communication means that they must augment their words...much as I have done in this paper through the medium of italics, underscore and boldface typographics.  In computer communication, individuals generally have at their disposal only the linear representation of words on successive lines.   Because of the lack of standardization among computer systems from different vendors, message authors aren't even at liberty to use typographic conventions or colors to convey the meta-communications, because they cannot rely on the reader's ability to display the written message in the same way.
     We're forced, by the limited character-based messages in computerdom, to try to write "word pictures" that can be reconstructed by our distant correspondents.
ctual demands by filling the senses from the outside.