An Introduction to Digital Media by Tony Feldman.

1. What digital revolution?
Analogue and digital information
Speaking the language of computers

So, here I am with another book. It seems simpler for starters and as I borrowed it from the library a while ago, I felt like I had to read it before giving it back to the library.
So the first impression was good, despite its origin of 1997 I still find it interesting. It is a kind of prophetic book which introduces us to the future of digital media, but the time in fact is already there. We are moving to digital TV and analogue is history, but in the book they are talking about the future of digital TV.
As I was starting with the book, it stroke me right away and I kept on reading it from 12 to 1 o'clock. I'll try to finish the communities book later.

Some thoughts about the beginning (actually it is quite difficult to read when you try to note down all your thoughts as soon as they appear): The author starts the book with a description of analogue and digital media – analogue media is in continuous flow, a perpetual movement, but digital media has on and off states.

A good parallel is given by the analogue and digital watches, where analogue watch is in continuous movement, but with a digital watch you get the pause when seconds or minutes change, so it is not in continuous movement – and yes, it is so. I have never thought about it in this way!

The author gives five characteristics of digital media:

manipulable

networkable

dense

compressible

impartial (p. 3)

The first thoughts that came into my mind with digtal media being manipulable is that when you watch TV and you get these annoying ads in the middle (mind you, I do not watch TV daily, because I do not have one, thus I hate the ads especially) you automatically think that if it would have been a DVD or a recorded film, you could have forwarded the tape or just watched it without these annoying ads (I believe the ads can mostly be extremely dim-witted).

Analogue media is networkable, because there are several possibilities like you can reach it wherever you have a computer, for example, and internet connection. In Estonia it is especially good that lots of places have free Wifi. The information nowadays is embeddable and hyperlinkable and so on and so forth.

The author concludes his discussion about analogue and digital media with the fact that you can choose to view digital media from wherever you want to. He mentioned a TV screen, but sure it is possible to watch it from your portable phone, mp4 player or iPod.

I was also thinking that this book is from 1997, but the information still holds true. The first two parts that I read ended with the fact that you can view digital media from whichever screen you choose – your TV-set, some kind of a handheld screen (either telephone or mp4 player) or whatever you like.

So I think I have to cancel with this book here as well, because the deadline approached and I had to give the book to the library. I do not know if I should count this as a separate reading, but I will leave the notes here at least, maybe I will need them.