Sunday, February 1, 2015
Digital Cloud or Digital Fog?
The Digital age has transformed the way we communicate, the way we educate, the way we shop, manufacture, design, and think.
Digital information, (on or off ) sequences is not new. Nature has been coding information this way since the Big Bang. Life is coded for duplication by genetic microscopic chemical chains of (on or off) sequences and we think using (on or off) activations of complex electro-chemical neural pathways.
What is new is tools that mimic nature's information storage and propagation methods. At first these were as simple as beads on wires placed in an on or off position, switch boards with lighted arrays, and punch cards. Now, silicon chips using microscopic printing techniques can store and manipulate vast amounts of digital information and, most importantly, can translate alpha numeric languages into digital information for storage and manipulation and then reverse translate to a language humans can understand.
Our success as a species is credited to upright walking and an opposable thumb, but just as important were advanced communicative skills resulting from an articulate tongue. Our communicative skills were made possible by a combination of a voice box set back and down and an ability to manipulate lips tongue and air flow to produce a great variety of symbolic sounds. With sounds representing objects, (nouns), and sounds representing actions, (verbs), humans gained dominance in the biosphere through the use of these communicative skills and the cooperation these symbolic sounds made possible. Most of human history was oral but as cooperative associations became larger another symbolic level emerged; visual symbolism.
Early crude representations of animals and events drawn in the dirt and on cave walls were quickly associated with the sound symbols for the common object or action both represented and written languages began to form. At first the visual symbol and the sound symbol for a common object were not associated directly, but the advantage of being able to combine these symbolic steps by having a sound for each visual symbol allowed any voice sound to be represented as a visual symbol and suddenly, for those privy to the code, the scratches in the dirt could be made to speak and sound symbols could be scratched into rocks to make spoken words permanent.
Humans took their first step away from a direct sense and react association with their environment when they began using symbolic sounds. They took their second step away from a direct cognizant connection with their environment when they began using visual symbols to represent, sound symbol thinking and now they have found a way to augment their use of both symbolic steps by using an intervening symbolic system that captures and allows the manipulation of all symbolic representations in digital form to create a new level of language and logic and a new interface with reality that serves as an intermediary between memory, reason and conclusions buried in the nuance of our sound and visual symbols that may be bringing us closer to an understanding of the reality around us or separating us further from the answers we seek. The advantages of our new digital approach seem obvious but it has had a greater impact on the cooperative structures that form our and sustain modern civilization than any in history and until we appreciate this shift and are willing to adapt, our economies and governments and our interpersonal, societal and international relationships are adrift
Have we created a benificial cloud of information or a fog?
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