"Digital is the new analog"

At the recent Digital Repatriation workshop Haidy Geismar, an anthropologist at NYU, remarked that "digital is the new analog." Though at first blush this may seem an empty statement, it actually forces us to think about a number of important issues. If digital is the new analog then it is no longer something new, something special in different. Rather, digital is now the norm, no longer to be thought of in opposition to the old analog.

We are moving into an era will where "digital" will cease to be a marked term. No longer will we need to prefix digital to an object or activity, for digital will be the accepted obvious medium. Just as years ago we never talked about making analog recordings, in years to come we won't need to talk about digital recordings. They will simply be recordings. Already we see signs of this happening. My kids talk about the "books" on their iPads or Kindles. They don't refer to these as "digital books" or "eBooks"; they are simply "books".

In the world of language documentation and archiving we continued to be concerned with issues of the digital. We live in a transitional time, moving from analog to digital. But these transitional days are numbered. Soon we will cease to think about analog and in turn cease to need to qualify our activities with the word digital. Digital is indeed becoming the new analog.