ATS1280 Chap.3 Digital Media: Code, Sampling and Convergence
Digital Media: Code, Sampling and Convergence
Ordinary speech uses digital to mean modern, online or immaterial. This chapter starts from the literal senses instead: a digit is one numeral of a set, binary means constituted by two contrasting parts, and analogue, in the dictionary sense the slide displays, names anything that is a parallel or an equivalent of something else, and in the case of a machine one working on smoothly varying physical measures.
Digital data then reduces to two conditions. There must be enough held states to tell things apart, and some agreed scheme must say which arrangement corresponds to which thing. The second is the interesting one, because a convention is social and ownable, which is the crack the later chapters widen.
From there the chapter follows sampling and the encoding chain, and arrives at the two consequences the unit says will keep returning: convergence, with intermediality and the rise of content inside it, and proliferation through duplication, which erases the difference between an original and a copy.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The literal senses of digit, binary and analogue, and what each of them rules out
- 02
The two conditions digital data requires, and why the second is a convention
- 03
Sampling: a continuously varying quantity measured at intervals becomes a list
- 04
The chain of encoding, processing and decoding, and the version with encoding removed
- 05
Four questions to ask of any digital medium, from original to convention
- 06
Convergence, intermediality, and the rise of content as a single word for everything
- 07
Proliferation through duplication, and the erased difference between original and copy
- 08
Asymmetry and the contingency of technology: week 3 applied to week 4
Explain a change without saying it went digital
- 1Identify what the carrier used to enforce. A print was a single physical object, so viewing required possession, sharing required either surrender or duplication at cost, and the number of images was limited by the film in the camera.
- 1Apply the two consequences. Coding as numbers cuts the tie to any particular machine, so the image can be looked at anywhere; proliferation makes each further copy free, so sharing no longer competes with keeping.
- 1Name what changed rather than what disappeared. Printing did not become impossible; it stopped being the condition of viewing. The print survives where its physical properties are wanted, which is the test that the mechanism was identified correctly.
Key terms
- Binary
- Built out of exactly two contrasting categories. Everything digital is nothing but arrangements of two states, which is why the interesting constraints are how many can be stored and what convention interprets them.
- Encoding
- Turning something into code, which for a smoothly varying input means measuring it at intervals and writing down each measurement as a number. It is the step that puts unlike kinds of media into one kind of storage.
- Intermediality
- Media forms borrowing each other's conventions once they share a format and a device. It sits inside convergence and explains why a feed can behave like a broadcast without anyone deciding that it should.
- Proliferation through duplication
- The multiplication of media that follows when copying is free and lossless. Its sharpest consequence is that the distinction between an original and a copy has nothing left to rest on.
- Common format
- One code into which sound, image, text and movement can all be converted. It cuts the tie between a work and any particular machine, socket or setting.
Digital Media: Code, Sampling and Convergence FAQ
What is the difference between digital and binary?
Binary describes the form the record takes, two contrasting states. Digital describes the representation built out of that form, in which combinations of states stand for something under an agreed convention. Binary alone is only a pattern; it becomes digital media when a system exists that says which pattern means which sound, colour or letter.
Does digital mean higher quality?
Nothing in the definition says so. Measurement happens at intervals, so whatever fell between them was never written down, and how much was lost depends on how often and how finely the measurement was taken. Quality is a property of the sampling and the convention rather than of being digital, which is why analogue and digital versions can be better or worse than each other in either direction.
Why does the unit care about the original and copy distinction?
Because a great deal of media law, media economics and media sentiment was built on it holding. A negative had an original and a pressed record had a master, so scarcity could be manufactured and sold. When every copy is the same list of numbers, asking which is real stops being a hard question and becomes a meaningless one, and the business models built on the answer lose their foundation.
Assessment move
This is the most technical chapter in the unit and the one most likely to be learned as vocabulary and then used vaguely, so tie every term to a consequence as you learn it. Make a two column card: on the left the four things digital encoding does, on the right one concrete change each of them produced.
Practise the four questions from the encoding page on media you use daily, especially the first, because whether there was an original decides everything about fidelity and authenticity and nothing else does. Pay attention to the version of the chain with encoding removed, since material born as code has no original to be faithful to and that distinction is worth a paragraph in either essay.
Finally, keep the week 3 discipline running: convergence and free duplication were technical facts plus commercial and legal arrangements, and an answer that presents them as inevitable has slipped back into determinism.
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