Uneven Distribution.

Going analog.

January 10th, 2010

I really like George Dyson’s response to Frank Schirrmacher’s “Age of the Informavore” talk, published in Edge #303.

“Google, Facebook, Twitter, not to mention the Web as a whole — are effectively operating as large analog computers, although there remains a digital substrate underneath”.

It’s worth contemplating that the next time you think you work in digital. Because the really good work is no longer digital. Yes it uses digital as a platform, as a method for delivery. But the experience inherent in the idea, is truly analog. It’s foundation is always in an emotional response, a human interaction.

And then Dyson finishes…

“When you are an informavore drowning in digital data, analog looks good.”

Which gave me a glimmer of hope for advertising and marketing. Display advertising as we know it, all that  intrusive and usually poorly targetted noise that we are bombarded with daily, is very much ‘digital’ advertising. Calculated through complex algorithms by cold computers who don’t understand me despite their 8-core processors.

But the work that I really admired last year was actually very much analog.

Analog rather than digital is the difference between going to the Volkswagen website to look at brochureware about the newest Golf, and downloading an iPhone game allowing you to race (essentially test drive) the same car. It’s the difference between putting your views on being the leader of the free world on your campaign site, and actively recruiting people to form communities and spread your word. It’s the difference between creating an online stats database for high-school footballers, and allowing you to visualise and compare your stats to your heroes and peers.

I think if we can start our work with the mindset of “What behaviour do we want to create that people will want and need?” rather than “How do we do this thing that we’ve alway done, but do it better digitally?”, we could more easily be creating these analog interactions in a digital world.

The more of these experiences that we create, the more experiences that people will actually seek out and want to be part of, the less interruptive and irrelevant noise we will need to create. And that can only be a good thing.

Postscript: Re-reading this post, I realise that what I’ve said is blindingly obvious to those of you that inhabit the echo chamber that is digital advertising blogging. But I’m going to post it anyway, partially because I wrote it, so I may as well, but also because I don’t think I’ve quite done justice to Dyson’s thoughts. So go check out his response  (and the many other briliant responses)  to Schirrmacher at Edge.

Comments

What many ‘digital people’ forget is that we’re actually analogue creatures - what we do, eat, taste, see and hear are all analogue. Our brains don’t even need to act as DAC for all the digital information as it has to be converted to analogue for us to even begin to use it. No one for example as ever really heard digital music…The substrate is therefore ultimately carbon, us carbon units as people.

[...] I was reading Nic Hodges blog today and found a really great piece of insight here [...]

[...] - Nic Hodges, “Uneven Distribution” [...]

Great blog.

I partially disagree.

The brain though it appears analog on a large scale is composed of neurons that in turn communicate through synapses.. Thus making the “firing” process discrete and while I am not splitting hairs on terms what you mean by digital is not numbers but quantized blocks of info as opposed to the sinusoidal and continuous waveforms in the real world the actual part of the analog stops at the auditory or visual cortex.. then it’s all discrete from there.

The only non discrete thing becomes the levels of the “hormones”, and peptides but they have a global effect. Word come from discrete firings and concepts are pretty much segmented in our grey matter.

(I think analog and digital(discrete) are two faces of the same coin. Any system that clusters and memorizes will quantize and hence make”digital” all information. Only exception are delay lines.

If you see the function of an old analog machine working ( operational amplifiers) , vs the modern computers i.e. the transistor you shall see the difference in paradigm.

bye