Book: Defining Digitalities I: What’s Digital about Digits?
Abstract
Modern discourses emphasizes electronic immateriality as the defining feature of digital technology. The idea that digits might be digital when punched onto cards, or even written on a piece of pa- per, is no longer intuitive. Yet by reconstructing the context in which the categories of digital and analog were first distinguished histori- cally in the 1940s, I argue that the concept of digitality is rooted in the mechanical representation of digits in early computers, which con- temporary observers immediately recognized was shared with earlier technologies such as telephone switching systems, punched cards, and calculating devices. Digitality is not a feature of an object itself, but of the way that object is read (whether by human or by machine) as encoding symbols chosen from a finite set. In conclusion, digitality is constituted through reading practices.
Preferred Citation
BibTex
Haigh, Thomas: Defining Digitalities I: What’s Digital about Digits?. Siegen: Universität Siegen 2023. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/20046.
@BOOK{Haigh2023,
author = {Haigh, Thomas},
title = {Defining Digitalities I: What’s Digital about Digits?},
year = 2023,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/20046}",
volume = 30,
issn = {2567–2517},
address = {Siegen},
series = {Medien der Kooperation},
publisher = {Universität Siegen},
}
author = {Haigh, Thomas},
title = {Defining Digitalities I: What’s Digital about Digits?},
year = 2023,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/20046}",
volume = 30,
issn = {2567–2517},
address = {Siegen},
series = {Medien der Kooperation},
publisher = {Universität Siegen},
}
Keywords
As long as there is no further specification, the item is under the following license: Creative Commons - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen