On the (claimed) novelty of digital Sample Clauses

On the (claimed) novelty of digital. ‌ Hence, digital communication has nothing new, nor anyway there is anything new in analog communication. In their biological and societal evolution, human beings developed sophisticated means to communicate, in both analog and digital ways. It is interesting that analog coding is generally much easier to learn, and human beings have some analog coding directly built in: the message conveyed by a caress vs a slap is clearly analog, and it does not require any learning stage. On the other hand, while very primitive communication may be conceived as also purely analog (through onomatopoeic sounds, rules such as the more the risk the louder the shout, and so on), human beings have learned to deal with so many different and so structurally complex entities that our communication has becomes largely conventional in its coding rules, and therefore digital (while distinguishing a table from a chair by means of a sketch is analog, the English terms “table” and “chair” can be associated to tables and chairs only by a case by case convention; interestingly, some languages maintain some analog components also in verbal communication through term modifiers, for example for size: in Italian “tavolo”, for “table”, admit variations such as “tavolone” and “tavolino”, where the suffixes “-on-” and “-in-” are generic for “big” and “small” and therefore are somehow analog). As a consequence, the possible novelty of digital is not to be looked for in traditional ways to handle information: since millennia they are already largely digital. Rather, and somehow paradoxically, what is novel in digital is justified by its low efficiency, such that until a relatively recent past technological communication (telephone, radio, television) has been mainly analog: only the widespread availability of microelectronic components has provided the large arrays of bistable devices required to make digital coding technologically affordable. As mentioned, the benefit is a practical almost complete separation between information and physical supports, that has led to a reification of information far greater than in the past: once implicitly assumed as something to be treated by humans only (“wetware”), by means of its digital coding information has become software, databases, websites, etc. What is new is then that we now have machines that are particularly efficient and fast at processing digitally-coded information: the digital computers. This opens a whole new range of possibilities.