Recently I was thinking about the concept of digital. Did you know that the original inspiration for the concept of the binary number system was yin and yan? -the Chinese concept of 2 equal but opposite entities which are the forces that shape all things in the universe (...well, something like that anyway). I always found this ironic because I consider digital to be one of the things tugging at the loose threads of the big wooly jumper that is time and space. Let me explain:

A few months ago I was looking at these old family slides we have stashed away in a cupboard. The slides (taken and stored entirely "old school") have seen better days. But so have my parents. My parents, who feature a lot on these slides, are wrinkled tired worn out old things. They have laugh lines, frown lines, sunspots and scars. They have lived a while, and you can see it. Time has slowly changed them, 1 day at a time. The slides are the same. They have collected dust. They have gotten scratched. There have hairs from both our late cat George and our present cat muffin crammed into the edges of the slide frames. The images on the slides have warped through so many hot summers since they were first developed. The colours in the pictures of my Grandpa have faded like his skin did when he died, almost as if they are making a silent show of respect to him. Which brings me to digital.

The physical markers of time and life passing by won't affect a digitally stored image the way they do a physically stored one. Dust, sunlight and heat can't touch it. There will no longer be any evidence that an image has seen time pass, that an image is "old" and that it has a story of its own. Is this the ultimate insult to time? Is something really ever old, even meaningful, if it is stored for 20 years digitally?

A digitally stored image is as real and cold as in the instant it first flashed across a retina. Pictures will grow no warm, fuzzy edges in a computer's memory the way they do in the mind. The "kind of neat" people of today won't turn into mythological figures ala Jesus and Hercules. It's too late, they've already had their heroic exploits videotaped and stored in a windows media file. Their story won't be changed by the chinese wispers of centuries of poets and storytellers. That "cool thing they did" will never turn into godlike exploits envolving armies 10,000 strong.

I am still considering storing my photos digitally so that they will stop their gradual fade (however justifiable I may have made decay sound in this blog). Maybe it isn't so bad if the images are frozen for all time. But there is another issue here. To capture or store something digitally means to have complete certainty of what the subject is made up of. The EXACT colours, the EXACT pieces, the EXACT shapes etc. The pieces that make up a digitally stored photograph are represented by either a 0 or a 1. There is no ambiguity. No infinite, no continuums. What about all the details that we DON'T freeze in the streamed store of 0s and 1s? What of them? If we believe totally in digital storage, what will happen to the infinite bits and pieces inbetween that we miss every time we "losslessly" store something? Will historians thousands of years from now curse us for leaving them perfectly preserved but crude digital aliases of Rembrandts? Certainly to believe unquestioningly in the good of digital is to start believing that everything in the world is simple and basic. That we know what it's all made up of and what it's all about. Hell, why bother digitally storing it at all, apparently we already know it's made up of either a 0 or a 1! Is that a new type of decay? The decay of things based on our willingness to throw away the details, the in-between bits we don't quite understand. To throw away the bits we can't quite map, at least not yet. Are we breeding a kind of digital maggots, eating away at all the blurred edges in the world?

So if you were to swallow all of the aforementioned (mmm, tasty maggots!), you would probably be left thinking that digital freezes life and is a new kind of scary "decay". Hence, digital is death. Maybe not. Maybe digital "kills" things, but it also gives birth to things. The internet is the obvious example. A monstrous construct of information and communication that is perhaps the most lively and volatile of mediums. It has developed it's own culture, it's own speak, its own conventions. It has it's own superstars (hi Strongbad!). Any moronic mooch can get on/into it and become part of the Internet's very own underclass (hi!...like my blog?). It's alive. It even has diseases (spam, viruses, cnn.com).

I don't know. Someone ask god if he digs robots and put me out of my misery. Failing that give Allah or Bhudda a call.

Insanely obvious links:

A good source for "cyberculture+politics"--> www.wired.com

The world of geek! --> www.slashdot.com

Permanence. Permanence. Unfortunately saying it twice won't make it linger much longer. Once the word is read; once it has left my lips when spoken; once it is written, it is already over. Faster than an SMS affair. On a night of melancholy wandering not too long ago I stopped by this crappy petrol station near where I live. I went in and bought a stale, crappy hot dog and sat outside contentedly snacking. Why did this meal and this place give me such comfort? Why did the nauseating food in my belly and the glow of the neon lights overhead warm my soul? Because THIS petrol station and THESE crappy hot dogs have been there longer than the others. Unlike all the other petrol stations THIS one has not been shut down, moved or even renovated. The hot dog rotissary warmer has been turning between the chips aisle and the ice-cream fridge since primary school grade seven. It's not even a particularly charming or "rustic" place. It has a dull, clean, conventional look. There are much better meals to be had in the gleaming new super-service-centres in the surrounds. There is comfortable seating and pleasant relaxing musak just about anywhere else. They probably even have the same brand of stale hot dogs. But anywhere else they taste crap.

What a strange thing to find comfort in. It's not like the petrol station is some sort if independant oddity with a charming old couple called Bill and Sheryl fighting on in the face of international-petrol-station-chain-pressure. Its just a Caltex that seems to be stuck in time -though it seems to define no era. I guess I like it because it has just quietly stayed rather than pretending it is old or making a big heritage-listed fuss over itself. Makes you think. New "Retro-Look" Cars designed to fall apart after 6 years. 2 day zen workshops. Spray-on paint jobs for concrete, made to look like "weathered stone brick". Traditional Irish pubs opening up everywhere (except Ireland where they're closing down). Pre-industrial era role-playing video games. 70s haircuts (isn't that an oxymoron?). It's amazing how much people want things to stay or to come back, yet aren't willing to let them "loiter". Let it ferment you fools, it will become wine...or at least cheap goon! I feel like a hot dog.