Weblog for New Media Storytelling

Posted: 12:45 p.m. 10/8/01
Revised after thoughts on the way to class: 4:15 p.m. 10/8/01

Reading Roger Fidler's explanation of the new "digital language" made me think of VH1 and Rolling Stone. Their habits of making lists and rankings, habits that escalated as the millennium passed, always have bothered me. When they attempt to sell their ideas of what's "the best" or "the most influential" of music, without fail they lean hard toward the recent, the music most fresh in our minds from video and radio's new age of payola.

But history is always seen through the lens of the present. Example: how many court cases were named "trial of the century" in the 20th century? Another phrase that has particular resonance today: "the war to end all wars." In the last decade, online investors and creators made the same mistake and overstated the importance of the Internet, leading them to lose major sums.

In Mediamorphosis, the way Fidler defines "digital language" lets him join that crowd. He claims this "language" stands apart from the past inventions of expressive language, spoken language and written language, but with this he misses his mark. Fidler fails to realize the old saying that "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

I agree with his statement that the world is experiencing a "third great mediamorphosis" due to the use of electricity in communications, but I think he confuses the mediamorphosis with the creation of a new language. The basis of the "digital language" has certainly been created, but it has not been realized yet.

How the basis has been created

Fidler is correct to assert that "digital language" has a similar background as the other forms of language. "Digital language," he says, "which uses numbers of encode and process information, was developed to facilitate communication between machines and their components" (71). Basically, "digital language" gets machines to work, a goal humans have had for thousands of years -- from the first wheel to today's supercomputers. With "digital language," electricity allows the machine to keep running without human power, and the technology involved has become far more tiny and complicated. Many levels of technology keep most people far away from the 1's and 0's of the binary code.

Stripping away the complicated nature of the technology, this lowest level of communication is the same as what humans have always experienced. "These binary switches can be interpreted as either on or off, one or zero, yes or no, black or white," Fidler writes (73). As civilizations invented alphabets and drew drawings in caves, the difference between "black or white" was crucial to people's understanding. Alphabets and representative drawings depend on the minute distinctions between the curves, positions and lengths of the lines forming their letters. Further back in history, the first stages of spoken languages involved teaching and learning the throat vibrations and tongue movements necessary for speech.

Why the basis isn't enough

With this history in mind, binary coding, computers' building blocks, is a modern, electricity-fueled breakthrough but does not stand alone as a new type of language. The technology of communication may be different, but the techniques of communcation are not new.

Internet communications	Type of language
words	written language
sounds	spoken language
pictures	expressive language

The binary building blocks have yet to be formed in a way that would form something different, a fourth type of language, digital or otherwise. I would be interested to see Fidler's examples of how this type of language already exists in a concrete form. Maybe when the digital technology surpasses the senses, like our ears and eyes, that we already use in the three existing types of language, then "digital language" will exist. Perhaps this language would use the digital building blocks, the 1's and 0's, as an interactive path between the building blocks of our own minds, the cells and synapses. But, right now, this is the stuff of science fiction. As technology exists today, "a language unlike any other" has not been invented (71).