Digital Aesthetics: Cultural Effects of New Media Technologies

Abstract

Digital computers represent information as a series of on/off states, or zeros and ones. Unlike analog media, which maintain ‘analogies’ of patterns (such as sound waves) as they are transformed into other states (such as electrical signals), digital media encode all forms of information into long series of binary digits (zeros and/or ones). The advantages of digitization include: the speed with which huge volumes of digital information may be processed and manipulated; the ready convergence of diverse information types into digital data; and the speed and flexibility with which this data may be compressed and distributed through information networks.