“Digital and Analog Sea
Waves”
20 March 1999
These
words come out like so many bytes of data.
And I find myself realizing for the first time, again, forgetting, that
the spoken word is digital.
When
I was a young boy, I became fascinated with radio: the sending and receiving of
analog signals. And I explored this
world by study and hands-on building of many transmitters and receivers but in
the end, could never really grasp the concepts which allowed the mixing of analog
waves into intelligent sound. Beat
frequency oscillators, phase shift, intermediate frequency mixers. I could never “see” the results of such
analog signal mixing in my head.
In
college, I was lucky enough to be there when computers were beginning to be
wide spread enough that programming was being taught and unlike the analog
world, I understood the digital world immediately. Loops and representations, simulations and models.
Later,
I spent years designing simulations and models which provided digital
representations of the analog world but in doing so, discovered or realized, the
limitation of the digital world. A
digital representation is not a true representation no matter how complete or
robust. 100000 defined parameters cannot and will not ever allow the complete representation of our analog world and
we live in an analog world.
Out
on the sea, in a heavy sea, with waves crashing into each other, large and
small, and the resulting “mixed” wave moving on to collide with yet another
wave or 1000 waves from all directions, it is this world which is real and like
the world I see every time I open my eyes and yet, I am so deficient to
understand the complex wave patterns I see before me and now, this morning, I
see again how language and thought are digital and failing in their ability to
convey, define, represent, the changing seascape.
If
I was told once I was told 100 times, that my father was not good at talking or
expressing his feelings. He blamed it
on his lack of education and feelings of being inferior to the educated. Others blamed it on his perpetual depression
but I wonder now, if he was also a digital man in an analog world and found
words and combinations of words a very poor or impossible method to model the
world he knew and the feelings he had.
Digital
thoughts. Do I think digitally? In small chunks of space and time? Breaking down complex patterns into
parameters, values and then adding and subtracting until a conclusion is
reached?
Seascape. Waves upon the surface of the ocean. Collisions, oscillations,
cancellations. This is life and
yet, I stare and stare and am at a loss
how to describe and even worse, predict.
And
do all these words, now on paper, convey anything? Do they model, simulate, the feelings I am feeling and want to
transmit across space and time ? I speak
into a microphone attached to a radio transmitter and at least, the sounds of
my voice are thrown, in tact, across the distance to another. Analog signals. True representations.
Chunk,
chunk, chunk go the words on the paper.
Bytes of data, strung together in hopes that the resulting sum will
closely match an analog equivalent. And
what is the analog equivalent? What am
I trying to say?
Discovery. I am not thinking digitally, in words, but
in some misty cloud of the analog seascape world where ideas form, build and
crash into other thoughts with the resulting wave again building and crashing
into still other thoughts and it is no wonder writing feels so inadequate.
And
seeing that sending my thoughts through the analog to digital converter of speech
and the written word changes the thought, and leaves it only a shadow of its
original power and breadth and wanting again to understand at the base level,
the mixing and thrashing of feelings and knowing that it is here, there, that
the truth about the world lies.
Words. Digits.
Models. Simulations.
Wonder
if there was ever a time, before the caveman could speak, if thoughts were
conveyed in some true analog way? Is
it now and I too stupid, too digitized, to see and hear?
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