"In contrast to analog media where each successive copy loses quality, digitally encoded media can be copied endlessly without degradation" (Manovich, 2001, 69)
Manovich begins by looking at William J. Mitchell's 'The Reconfigured Eye' (1982), In which Mitchell talks about how analog media "cannot be transmitted or copied without degradation" (Mitchell, 1982: 6) At the time of writing, Mitchell was living in a world where digital media was a break through in technology and it was looking like it was about to completely revolutionise the way media artefacts where accessed, developed and broadcast. It looked like nothing could destroy digital media and that anything which was digitally accessed was safe from complete destruction.
Mitchell goes on to refer to his view of digital media and how he believes it is completely lossless, "a digital image that is a thousand generations away from the original is indistinguishable in quality from any one of its progenitors".
He believes that digital media is invincible through generations of being passed down. For example. An old photograph will stain of the years with age and use, but if a digital image is stored on a hard drive for the same amount of time, it will be in the same condition and quality as when it was taken.
However, Manovich, speaking nearly twenty years after Mitchell, and being in the middle of the digital revolution, knows how digital media can be just as short-termed as analog media. "A single digital image consists of millions of pixels. All this data requires considerable storage" (Manovich, 2001: 70)
Even another decade later and we still cannot say that we have confidence in how computers store our media files. With technologies like DropBox, GoogleDrive and SkyDrive, surely we are just bypassing the problem instead of eliminating the problem which we built.
Bibliography
Mitchell, W.J., The Reconfigured Eye (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982)
Manovich, L., The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001)
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