Digital vs. Analog – Socioexperiential Facsimiles

We have arrived in a reality that is now fully sculpted by the digital. From the cradle to the grave, from the smallest nuance of life to the largest pushes on the geopolitical stage, the first moves are always triggered, shaped, and publicized digitally. Analog technologies and media are held onto by a small group of purists who attest to their inimitable qualities. With the rise of AI, the digital disciples see the transition as complete, and the new era, fully born, can begin. But what does digital do, or give us, in actuality – what does it represent? At closer inspection – whether it’s in music production, photography, visual media in general, or various social media phenomena – there is a solid argument to be made that digital technologies only ever imitate or attempt to mirror analog technologies or experiences. When digging into the reasons why, it becomes fairly evident. We are bound by our biology, and our methods of representing reality or celebrating the emotions it evokes in us necessarily reflect and unintentionally celebrate our imperfections. Digitally attempting to copy, or even correct, them will necessarily result in flat, empty creation.

Creatively, whether in art or in human endeavors to fashion functional tools and systems through which to productively interact with nature, humans have developed their output based on how the results resonate with the world and ourselves. We zero in on the outcome that yields the most aesthetically or functionally immediate approximation of what we hope to achieve. I’ll mainly focus on creative pursuits here but hope to make a point that resonates beyond. Analog technologies were our first attempts at capturing or unleashing what had up until that point been fleeting moments of life experience that literature or painting had captured in more or less allegorical terms, even when striving for realism. Photography, film, and musical recording were, in a similar fashion to writing or painting, ways to intimate the vast spectrum of senses and emotions triggered by the real-life experience of a landscape, a nighttime urban scene, a symphony, or a lone singer of a folk song. We grew used to their limits and love those aesthetically, in the knowledge of what they implied.

As analog slowly gave way to digital, the first impulse was always to try to copy what had come before. One need only think of all those “strings” and “congas” in early synthesizers to recall a) the first port of call being a replica of analog phenomena, and b) how short these attempts fell, though they themselves grew to become aesthetically sought after and celebrated over the decades. As the digital revolution picked up steam and more music and image processing moved to computers and programs, this reproduction of the analog to evoke similar experiences and emotional reactions picked up pace. Plugins for audio production software sought to give the cold or flat-sounding digital, analog warmth and depth by trying to recreate the effects of analog equipment, be they preamps or pedals. Filters overlay softening tones to infuse digital imagery with faux-analog warmth, while VHS crackle or grain can be added to make a video look as if it dates from the '90s or earlier. This is all meant to evoke certain emotional reactions and degrees of authenticity connected to the aesthetic of analog. We are also so far along now in our digital trajectory that most formats are a pastiche of the real-world equivalent from a few decades ago. Twitch streamers will play through a game while thousands watch, whereas teens used to sit around their friend's room watching them or other friends play a game, waiting for their turn, and engaging in inane conversation. Podcasts similarly emulate a normal hang with your friends, talking about all kinds of subjects and filtering it through the interests of whoever is leading the conversation. These stretch from genuine intellectual discussions to the most base, stupid drivel, which is the range of most conversations in a real friendship. Around the world, millions of people go about their day in solitude with a background environment of heartfelt, jovial, angry, religious, or intellectual discourse that substitutes the real analog experience that would be had when having these conversations with friends and families. Now it is the podcast topics themselves that tend to be conversation starters in real life, where the participants regurgitate what they learned from their individual podcast bubbles, never actually connecting on a real level and building the deeper bonds it takes to create the feeling of understanding and belonging people are chasing by consuming all the various media in the first place.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” – Brian Eno

So why, as we attempt to push all our media to perfection, are we continuously pulled back to these limits as wellsprings of authenticity? No matter how far we travel, we circle back to imitating our limits. The reason simply lies in our biology and our own extremely limited perspectives as beings – something we continuously shut out in modernity. All our senses are imperfect, even for our existence on Earth. Among all the species on Earth, we cannot claim to have the best eyesight or the best hearing. We aren’t able to get anywhere near the deepest depths of our own oceans or breathe comfortably at the highest peaks. Even on our home planet on which we evolved, we are extremely limited in what we can experience and have to undergo rigorous training to even be able to push these boundaries. As such, we have always lived in awe of the seemingly immeasurable world and universe that surrounds us. Deep down, we are very aware of the grand scale of what we have been thrown into. Creatively, we strive to approximate the grandeur, whether literal, emotional, or sensual, of the little we are able to perceive. Productively, we strive to combine our small and meager creations to force our way into the huge trajectories of life that surround us. Bit by bit, we brought forth analog methods that would help us either tap into or momentarily capture those moments of access into something larger. As these technologies and media produced their own experiential phenomena, we associated those expectations and emotions with the rituals of music, art, production, or even transportation.

At the same time, all those rituals and emotions are still anchored in our emotional and biological existence. Digital approximations of those are simply that – approximations. That is not to say they are bad, or even necessarily lesser; the analog is, in its own way, an attempt to tap into and evoke the larger world surrounding us. But once we move into the digital age of social media, we take a large step away from what we are actually trying to achieve with any of these undertakings, and it becomes a process of multiplying, of quantity over quality. Taking those attempts at capturing or telling the story of fleeting moments and recreating them ad infinitum deadens that effect. Sitting in front of a screen along with thousands of others, listening and watching someone or a few people talk or play, is not a replacement for getting together and sitting around. Even when you end up doing nothing, you have done it together, and you had to move yourself through various experiences to make that meeting happen.

The point is that all of these phenomena and experiences are simply a facsimile of a real-world equivalent, and we have gotten to the point that we will initiate that facsimile even when we are having a real-world moment. Many poses that people will adopt in pictures are copies of spontaneous, random moments that were previously captured on film, when people didn’t actually think too long or hard about what they were doing in a picture (you probably wouldn’t have been seeing it for a few weeks anyway). We film moments – at a concert, in a club, random events, the weather – that we are actively living through in an attempt to capture something. What that something is seems to be unclear. I would posit that it is the intuition that this is a real-life moment worth capturing for the emotions you would normally be feeling, or should be feeling, at that moment, but you have now become one step removed from the actual thing. Afterwards, those pictures and videos go into everyone’s endless archive of footage they will never look at again. Who knows, maybe it is our attempt at immortality.

In the end, the digital is both a shortcut and a multiplier, a fast track to creating and duplicating the product that will most closely resemble the experiences and artifacts that conjure those responses that make us feel most alive, understood, or connected. The problem is that those types of experiences always involve some kind of imperfection, some inconvenience, some boredom or awkwardness, not to mention regular disappointment, failure, or simply the realization of one’s own unrealistic expectations. Maybe too much of one’s own limitations are reflected back at oneself? The point, however, of all those creative pursuits down through time was precisely working within the limits to overcome them and fashion something bigger than the sum of its parts. There is the story of how The Beatles felt a noticeable fall-off in their creativity whilst recording once they switched from having to squeeze as much as they could out of four tracks to having the luxury of having eight. Not only that, but they were recording onto tape, which could only be used for a limited number of takes before becoming defective. Today, of course, anyone recording anything has an unlimited number of tracks, with which to record an unlimited amount of takes, at their disposal. The same goes for film, let alone sitting down to write a book. Technological advances have come at the cost of creativity and ingenuity, but are perfect for endlessly reproducing copies. AI is the ultimate manifestation of this, where, with the click of a mouse, millions of songs, images, books, and documentaries can be reproduced, which do not serve to access any deeper human experience, but rather are there as a backdrop to the endless drumbeat of social media input.

That isn’t to say that these technologies do not have a place. They very much do, even in the fields I have just named. The point is that it is not binary; it is not either/or. Healthcare, for example, could benefit massively from AI, as do many other sectors. It is dependent on how we use these technologies, with what type of thinking and understanding of our own position vis-à-vis knowledge creation (and art is included in this), as well as in the world at large and in the longer trajectory of Earth history. We are anchored to a certain experience of the universe, and digital versions of this will still only ever be a facsimile of our extremely limited view of it. They, and especially AI, create endless versions of this faulty perspective of ourselves and the world. As such, they are not necessarily creating anything better or new, just more efficient ways of sorting and reproducing information. With that in mind, they can be put to good use in helping build structures and knowledge bases that help to improve society as we hope to envision it. Integrating our own very real limitations, we should also understand that employing it in the realm of creativity actively lessens the (already limited) human experience of the world. Using the technologies intelligently and, more importantly, knowing when not to use them and appreciating the media that is created as such, might lead to a digital-analog media landscape that could provide nuanced experiences that contribute to a more creatively and technologically articulate and knowledgeable society that will actively engage in these worlds. With a view on the current torrent of slop that we are drowning in and the fundamental lack of media literacy, let alone actual literacy, this seems almost utopian.