Analog to Digital

Abstract

Marshall McLuhan describes impact of new media with phrase the is message. McLuhan's medium is any extension of human senses and he focuses on media such as print, photographs, telephones, and weapons throughout his text Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). McLuhan's message explains way a new affects a culture, 'message' of any or technology is change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (1) He provides railway as an example. This did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged scale of previous human function, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. (2) Similarly, digital photography accelerates or enlarges traditional processes. Digital technology allows for greater ease in editing than analog photography, because it transforms photographs from objects into data. Thus, digital imaging technology theoretically disrupts previous notions of indexical connection between images and Digital photography challenges historical belief that photography is representative of reality. But have viewers' perceptions shifted in relation to theoretical discussions? While digital technology affects theoretical notion of index, these theories overlook appearance of image and social applications of transparent lens-based media. Viewers continue to read digital photographs as representative of reality, a function images maintain despite transition from analog to digital. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The notion of photograph as index relies on physical and chemical processes that constitute medium. In film-based photography, light bounces off an object and is recorded in silver salts of film's emulsion. This process depends on presence of an object in front of camera's lens in order to record its image through projected light. Roland Barthes describes relationship between object and image and time as that-has-been. According to Barthes, this characteristic is unique to photography: I call photographic referent not optionally real thing to which an image or sign refers but necessarily real thing which has placed before lens, without which there would be no photograph ... In daily flood of photographs, in thousand forms of interest they seem to provoke, it may be that noeme That-has- been is not repressed ... but experienced with indifference, as a feature that goes without saying. (3) Photographs are perceived to represent reality in their reference to a subject in time. As Barthes explains, Show your photographs to someone--he will immediately show you his: 'Look, this is my brother; this is me as a child, etc.' (4) It was this physical, indexical connection to reality that resulted in photography's use as visual recorder in documentary contexts such as news imagery. In contrast to physicality of analog process, digital images are translated into code. This occurs at moment image is taken if it is photographed with a digital camera; during editing process if film is scanned to be altered, printed, or displayed; and in distribution of image if it is displayed on a computer or screen. The lack of physical connection between a digital photograph's subject and image suggests digital images function as pure iconicity. (5) Mary Ann Doane argues: The index makes that claim [of its connection to reality] by virtue of its privileging of contact, of touch, of a physical connection. The digital can make no such claim and, in fact, is defined as its negation ... Digital media emerges as apparent endpoint of an accelerating dematerialization, so much so that it is difficult not to see very term digital media as an oxymoron. …