With all the talk in the air about digital vs. analog communication, it starts to beg an important question: what are the tradeoffs of switching from widespread analog communication to primarily forms of digital communication?
One of the primary tradeoffs we make when using digital communication is how phone calls are made. When you are on the phone, there is actually a special device called an ‘analog to digital convertor’ that takes the input sound of your voice, with all the nuances and inflections, and converts those sounds into digital signals. Typically, there are about 40,000 samples transmitted, per second, over the phone to create enough input for a similar ‘digital to analog’ convertor on the other end. And because phones are constantly converting analog signals to digital, and back to analog, the average phone only picks up sounds between 800 and 8,000 Hz, which misses many of the sounds humans can hear in the 20-20,000 Hz range.
Another tradeoff comes in the form of bitmap photos, which are made of tiny blocks called ‘pixels’, with a typical computer screen using about 2 million pixels, for reference. When we take photos with digital cameras, every image is comprised of these pixels, and therefore, the smallest details that we may be able to see with our bare eyes, can often be misinterpretted in photos. But it doesn’t stop there.
Something as simple as the loading time of a website can sway our perception of a specific brand or business. Research has found that webpages that load even half a second slower than an identical page are generally perceived as ‘less than’, or not as professional or polished. This idea, while it doesn’t directly come from the switch to digital technology, emphasizes this important idea that ultimately, we are sacrificing what makes humans so… human.
Now, we have to perceive tone through text messages, or have to make quick business decisions, because our forms of communication enable us, whether good or bad, to get near-immediate feedback on what we are saying, how we are acting, and who we are. And so, while digital communication has revolutionized humans in the way we can connect with each other, it has also drawn strong boundaries of how we do communicate with one another.