The whole world’s living in a digital dream
It’s not really there
It’s all on the screen
Makes me forget who I am
I’m an analog man— Joe Walsh Analog Man
Some people take Walsh’s song Analog Man as a tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating song. However, if we look at the actual lyrics of the song we see something different. Something darker. Something more human.
Walsh isn’t just saying he’s an old guy lamenting the loss of his youth. He’s pointing at the difference between the real and the digital. Analog media exists in the real world. You can hold a book. You can hold a strip of film. You can hold a record. You cannot hold a jpg file. You cannot hold a flac file. They are, in the end, an illusion, a fleeting representation of what used to be reality.
Nothing underscores the fleeting nature of the digital more than the recent incident at a PBS affiliate. Nine PBS in Saint Louis, Missouri
has reportedly lost seventy years of television archives after digitizing their collection. Then the cloud service provider simply went out of business. The obvious question is; “Why not just digitize the media again?” Sure, it would be a lot of work and they rightfully wouldn’t want to do that. Here’s the ultimate slap in the face; many outlets are reporting that they destroyed the analog copies after digitizing them.
Unlike digital media, analog media is physical which means you can make physical copies of it. Making a physical copy of digital media is possible, however it is seldom done and when it is done, it’s not the same thing as a real piece of analog created media.
Some may dismiss this as mere ramblings of a Gen-X’er who is growing older and can’t handle the new digital world. I would disagree. Many of us didn’t like, or embrace, the initial rollout of digital in 1982 with the digital compact disk. We preferred vinyl and tape. Vinyl records could be recorded onto cassette tapes so we could take our music with us. Cassette tapes could also be used to record songs off the radio and make mixtapes (a real thing) for our friends. Generation X were slow adopters of digital tech who had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital age.
More than just a preference for analog is the fact, possibly known intrinsically to Gen-X, that analog media provides a real, unchangeable, record of a moment in time. A photo of a ghost taken on film in a dark house at night provides a permanent record — whether you believe it’s a real ghost or not is beside the point. A negative exists. On that negative is an anomaly. Contrast this with planetary images from space probes. These are not images in any traditional sense of the word. They are not even images in the digital photography sense of the word. They are streams of 1s and 0s beamed to Earth from billions of miles away that cannot be seen by a human without first going through…
- Pulling the signal out of background noise because it is far fainter than the noise floor.
- Super-cooled hardware used to attempt isolating the signal from the background noise.
- Error correcting and filtering algorithms to decide which bits to keep and which to throw out.
- Interpolation algorithms used to decide what the brightness data actually means.
- Compositing algorithms used to stitch together separate data files into a single viewable image.
- Smoothing algorithms to make the raw images look like something realistic.
- False coloring performed by artists.
This is not real in any sense of the word, and moreover, it is surprisingly easy to completely fake or modify digital data to give the desired results. Such manipulation is much more difficult with analog media since we can physically see and hold the film that was in the camera once it is developed. The problem is bigger than just NASA faking photos of the outer planets. Once digitized, there is nothing stopping unscrupulous individuals from sanitizing, censoring, or simply deleting problematic media.
The rise of generative AI and videos that are indistinguishable from real life raises another concern. In the last six months prior to the writing of this article, we’ve seen an increase in dance, prom, and classroom videos purporting to be from the 1980s or even 1970s. While video cameras did exist at the time, the chance of a random parking lot or random dances are very slim. One might ask; “What’s the point?” The answer, without trying to sound conspiratorial, is control of the narrative. An authentic look into the 1970s or 1980s would be extremely uncomfortable for many modern audiences, as well as for those attempting to control the public’s perception of reality.
A recent move by Google, and possibly other tech firms, is buying, scanning, and then destroying analog books. Reports suggest this is being done to train AI models, but there are real dangers in projects like this.
Every destroyed book…
- represents a piece of human history, culture, and knowledge that is now locked behind a digital paywall.
- is susceptible to modification and/or censorship.
- could allow those with a vested interest to completely wipe competing or “dangerous” ideas from mankind.
Analog information, no matter the form; film negatives, physical slides, cassette tapes, vinyl records, VHS tapes, physical books, etc., is a fundamental right of every person because analog media is unchangeable and is one of the few safeguards the average person has to ensure the past, at least their past, is preserved.