nitpick: discrete vs. digital

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

> On Thu, 11 Jul 1996, Jeffrey Reid wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 11 Jul 1996, David L. Pelovitz wrote:
> > > I can't help but think that the television/film division is reinforcing
> > > a larger analog/digital division in Pynchon's work.  After all, film is
> > > digital, operating at 24 fps with absolute demarcations.
> > Don't be confused about the difference between digital and discrete.
> > a digital recording is (straight from the OED)
> >   "a Designating (a) recording in which the original waveform is
> > digitally coded and the information in it represented by the presence or
> > absence of pulses of equal strength, making it less subject to degradation
> > than a conventional analogue signal; of or pertaining to such recording."
> > 
> > Film may be recorded in discrete images but it is in no way digital.  No
> > ones and zeros.
> >
> You are confusing "digital recording" with "digital."  Digital is 
> nothing more than having the property of being able to be represented
> in discrete digits.  It isn't just ones and zeros (that's binary code,
> perhaps the most common use of the digital in Pynchon, but not the
> only one).  After all, doesn't a digital clock uses ten digits?
> In fact, I am wearing a standard face watch (hour, minute and second
> hands) and it states on the clock face that it is "Quartz digital".
> And you can tell because it clicks from second to second rather
> than sweeping as an analog watch would.
>  
> David Pelovitz - dqp5805 at is4.nyu.edu

Personally, I blame the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians with their obsessions 
about the numbers 12/24 and 60, for breaking down the lived moment 
into dead segments. And after the invention of time (analog? digital? 
are you fucking serious?) the rest is inevitable. The only difference 
between film and TV is that the one is in your face, day in and day 
out ("the 24 hour movie under the rug"?). Of course, there's nothing 
inherently wrong with 24fps - as long as we realize it's not an end 
in itself but just a means to an end, hopelessly compromised these 
days, it seems, but still, with the help of red wine and friends.... 

Maybe, though, we could characterize the transition chronicled in V, 
(from Victorianism to Modernism etc. etc.) as a transition from analog 
to digital? With echoes of God is dead but walks as Zombie, from 
clockwork to statistical game theory, machine/robot to computer, blablabla?

hg
hag at iafrica.com