The best way to understand the value and impact of "digital existence" is to consider the difference between "bits" and "atoms". While we are undoubtedly living in the information age, most information is distributed in atomic form, such as newspapers, magazines and books (like this book). Our economy may be shifting to an information economy, but when we measure the size of trade and record fiscal balances, we still have a lot of atoms in our minds. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, General Agreement on Tariffs Trade) is completely around atoms.

Recently, I visited the headquarters of a company that is one of the largest manufacturers of integrated circuits in the United States. When checking in at the front desk, the receptionist asked me if I had my laptop with me. Of course I brought one. So, she asked me what the model, serial number and value of this computer were. "It's worth about $1 million to $2 million!" I say. She replied, "No, sir, that's impossible. What the hell are you talking about?let me see. " I showed her my old "Power-Book" computer, which she estimated to be worth around $2,000.

She wrote down the number before letting me in. The point is that atoms are not worth that much, whereas bits are almost priceless. Not long ago, I attended a management seminar for senior executives at PolyGram in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The purpose of the meeting was to facilitate communication between senior executives and at the same time give everyone an overall idea of ​​the company's plans for the year ahead, so many upcoming releases of music, movies, video games and rock videos were showcased. They entrusted Federated Express to deliver this batch of packaged CDs, video cassettes, and CDs that weigh: weight, and volume to the venue.

Unfortunately, some packages were stopped by customs. The meaning of the information superhighway is to transmit weightless bits around the world at the speed of light. When industries look at themselves in the mirror and ask "what is my future in the digital world", in fact, their future depends 100% on whether their products or services can be converted into digital form. If you're making cashmere sweaters or Chinese food, you've got a long way to go to convert the product into bits. Like the people in "Star Trek" (StarTrek), who can disappear into light beams at any time, although it is fascinating, it may not be possible within a few hundred years.

So you still have to FedEx, bike or walk to get atoms from one place to another. This is not to say that digital technologies will be useless in design, manufacturing, marketing and management in atom-based industries. I am simply saying that the core characteristics of these industries will not change, nor will the atoms in their products be converted into bits. In the information and entertainment industry, bits and atoms are often confused. Are book publishers in information transmission (sending bits) or in manufacturing (making atoms)?The answer used to be both, but that will soon change as information appliances become more ubiquitous and easier to use.

It is difficult (though not impossible) for an information device to compete with the quality of a book these days. Books are not only clearly printed, but also light in weight and easy to read, and the price is not too expensive. However, to send books to your hands, you must go through various links such as transportation and storage. In the case of textbooks, 45% of the cost is the cost of inventory, shipping and returns. To make matters worse, printed books may be out of print (out of prini). Digitized e-books will never be like this, they will always be there. The risks and opportunities for other mediums are even more imminent.

The first entertainment atoms to be replaced by bits will be videotapes in video rental locations. One of the inconveniences of renting videotapes is that the consumer has to return the atoms, and if you slip them around and forget to return them, you have to pay a fine (3 billion of the $12 billion in revenue of the U.S. video rental industry is said to come from fines) ). Other media will also go digital, and it will be fast, due to a combination of the inherent convenience of digital products, economic compulsion, and deregulation. What exactly are bits?Bits have no color, size or weight and travel at the speed of light.

It is like the DNA in the human body, it is the smallest unit of information. A bit is a state of being: on or off, true or false, up or down, in or out, black or white. For practical purposes, we think of bits as "1" or "0". The meaning of 1 and 0 should be discussed separately. In early computing, a string of bits usually represented numerical information (numer-ica1informadon). If you skip all the numbers that don't contain 1s and 0s when you count, you'll get: 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, and so on. These numbers represent the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 etc. in binary.

Bits have always been the fundamental particle of digital computing, but over the past 25 years we have vastly expanded the vocabulary of binary to include a vast array of things beyond numbers. More and more information, such as sound and video, has been digitized and reduced to the same ones and zeros. To digitize a signal means to sample the signal. If we pack these samples closely together, we can almost completely reproduce the original state. For example, on a music CD, sound is sampled 44,100 times per second, and the waveform of the sound wave (a measure of sound pressure, which can be measured like voltage) is recorded as discrete numbers (these numbers are converted to bits) .

When the bit string reproduces at a rate of 44,100 times per second, the original music can be reproduced in a continuous tone. Since the intervals between these consecutive syllables sampled separately are extremely short, our ears cannot hear a segment of a separated scale, but a completely continuous tune. The same is true for black and white photos. You only need to think of the principle of an electronic camera as making a precise grid on an image, and then record the grayscale of each grid. Suppose we set the value of all black to 1 and the value of all white to 255, then any shade of gray will fall between the two.

And a binary bit group consisting of 8 bits (called a byte, or byte) has exactly 256 permutations of "1" And the way of "0", that is, from to 11111111. With this tight grid and detailed gradation of shading, you can perfectly reproduce images that are difficult to discern with the naked eye. However, if the grid you use is relatively rough, or the levels of light and shade are not fine enough, then you will see digital chisel marks, that is, vaguely visible outline lines and mottled grains. The principle of generating continuous images from individual pixels is very similar to the phenomena in the physical world we are familiar with, except that the process is more delicate. Matter is made up of atoms, but if you look at a polished, smooth metal surface at the subatomic level, you'll see lots of holes. We see metal as smooth and solid only because its components are so tiny. The same goes for digital products. However, the world we experience in our daily life is actually very "analog". From a macro point of view, the world is not digital at all, but has the characteristics of continuity. It will not switch suddenly, turn from black to white, or jump directly from one state to another without transition. That might not be the case on a microscopic scale, because the objects we interact with (electrons flowing in a wire or photons in our eyes) are discrete units. However, due to the large number of them, it seems to be continuous. This book contains almost 1 atom (books are an extremely analog medium). The benefits of digitization are many. The most obvious are the functions of data compression and error correction, which are even more important if the information is transmitted on a very expensive or noisy channel. For example, with such a function, the TV broadcasting industry can save a lot of money, and the viewer can also receive high-quality picture and sound. However, we have gradually discovered that the impact of digitalization is much more important than these. When we use bits to describe sound and video, just like saving energy, the fewer bits used, of course, the better. However, the number of bits used per second or per square inch will directly affect the fidelity of the music or video. Usually, we all want to use high-resolution (resolution) digital technology in some applications, while in other applications, as long as low-resolution sound and picture are enough. For example, we hope to print color images with high-resolution digital technology, but computer-aided page layout does not require high resolution. It can be seen that part of the economic system of bits is limited by the medium for storing and transmitting bits. The number of bits transmitted per second on a particular channel (such as copper wire, radio spectrum, or fiber optics) is the channel's bandwidth (band-width). This can be used to measure the number of bits each pipeline can hold. This amount, or capacity, must be carefully matched to the number of bits required to represent a particular piece of data (sound, music, video): 64,000 bits per second is a considerable amount for the transmission of high-quality sound Yes; 1.2 million bits per second is more than enough for high fidelity music; but if you want to send video, you have to have a bandwidth of 45 million bits per second to produce great results. Over the past 15 years, however, we have mastered the digital technique of compressing the original sound and picture by examining the bits separately and simultaneously in time and space, and removing their inherent cumbersome repetitions. In fact, one of the reasons for the rapid digitization of all media is that we developed a high level of compression earlier than most people predicted. Until 1993, some Europeans argued that the dream of digital imaging would not be realized until the next century. Five years ago, most people did not believe that we could compress 45 million bits per second, digital image information, to 1.2 million bits per second. However, by 1995, we were able to compress (compress) and decompress (decompress), encode (encode) and decode (decode) such a large amount of digital image information according to this ratio, and the cost was low and the quality was good. It's as if we've suddenly mastered the knack for making ground Italian cappuccino coffee, something so wonderful that just by adding hot water, you can enjoy the same mellow taste as freshly brewed coffee in an Italian cafe. Digitization allows you to send a signal with information that corrects errors (telephone noise, radio interference, or TV snowflakes) attached. These disturbances can be removed by simply adding a few extra bits to the digital signal and employing increasingly sophisticated error-correction techniques that react accordingly to noise and media. On CDs, 1/3 of the bit rate is used to correct errors. The same technology can also be applied to current televisions, so that every family can receive pictures with studio effects, and the images are so clear that you may mistake this kind of TV for the so-called "high-definition TV". TV" (high-definitionTV). Correcting errors and compressing data are two of the most obvious reasons for the development of digital television (digiialteievision). With the same bandwidth, in the past, only one analog TV signal full of noise can be accommodated, but now four high-quality digital TV signals can be packed. Not only is the picture quality going out better, but with the same channel, you can potentially quadruple the audience and quadruple the advertising revenue. When most media executives think and talk about what it means to be digital, it is the better and more efficient way that what already exists can be disseminated. But like a Trojan horse, this gift may have unintended consequences. As a result of digitization, entirely new content will proliferate, new competitors and new economic models will emerge, and a cottage industry of information and entertainment will likely emerge. When all media is digitized, since bits are bits after all, we observe two basic yet immediately visible consequences. First, bits mix effortlessly and can be reused simultaneously or separately. The mixing of sound, images and data is called "multimedia" (mu1timemedia). This term sounds complicated, but in fact, it just refers to the mixed bits (commingledbits). Second, a new kind of bit is born—a bit that tells you about other bits. It is usually a kind of "information title" (header that can explain the content and characteristics of the following information), and those newspaper reporters who often have to draw up a "summary title" for each report to indicate the content of the news are most familiar with this thing. Authors of academic papers are also familiar with these types of titles, as academic journals often ask them to summarize the main points of their papers as well. On your CDs, you'll also find simple titles that allow you to jump directly from one song to another, and sometimes, to get more material about the music. These bits can't be seen or heard, but can tell you, your computer, or a particular entertainment device something about the signal. These two phenomena, mixing bits and bits about bits (bits-about-bits), completely changed the world of media. Applications such as video-on-command and the use of cable TV channels to deliver video games pale in comparison—they're just the tip of a huge iceberg. Think about it, what would it mean if TV shows were transformed into data that included descriptions of the shows themselves that computers could read?You can record what you want without being limited by time and channels. Furthermore, what if this digital description allows you to choose the format of the program at the receiving end-whether it is sound, video or text?If we can move bits around so easily, what advantage do the big media companies have over you or me?These are all situations that digitization can trigger. It opens up endless possibilities, with never-before-seen shows coming to the fore from a whole new mix of sources. Where is the wisdom?A typical feature of television broadcasting is that all the intelligence is concentrated at the starting point of the information transmission. It represents a type of medium. The information disseminator decides everything, and the receiver can only accept what he receives. In fact, in terms of utility per cubic inch, your TV might be the dumbest appliance in your home right now (I didn't include the TV shows). Your microwave probably has more microprocessors than your TV. Rather than imagining future TVs with higher resolution, brighter colors, or the ability to receive more programming, think of it as a shift in the distribution of intelligence—or, more accurately, as Part of the wisdom is transferred from the transmitter to the receiver. As far as the newspaper is concerned, the transmitter also has all the wisdom. But the big newspapers more or less avoid the problem of single information, because different people can read newspapers in different ways at different times. We flip through pages and pages of newspapers, guided by different headlines and photos, and while newspapers deliver the same bits to thousands of readers, the reading experience is vastly different for each. To explore the future of digitalization, one of the ways is to see whether the essence of media can be transformed into each other. Can the experience of watching TV be closer to that of reading a newspaper?Newspaper news for many people is more in-depth than TV coverage. Is it inevitable?Likewise, watching TV was perceived as a richer sensory experience than reading a newspaper. Must be so?The answer depends on whether we can develop computers that allow us to filter, sort, arrange, and manage multimedia, computers that will read newspapers, watch television, and, if requested, act as editors. This intelligence can exist at both the transmitter and the receiver. When wisdom resides on the transmitter's end, it's as if you've hired a dedicated contributor yourself—like The New York Times tailoring its newspaper to your interests. In this case, the sender selects a set of bits specifically for you, filters them, processes them, and sends them to you, which you may print out at home or choose to display on a digital screen in a more interactive way. watch. Another situation is to set up a news editorial system on the receiver side. The New York Times first sends out a large number of bits, possibly including 5000 different articles, and your electronic device then according to your interests, habits or plans for the day, Extract the part you want from it. In this example, the intelligence resides on the receiver's side, and the transmitter treats all bits equally, sending all bits to all. The future will not be one of the two, but the coexistence of the two.