The decline of analogue communication.
You may be familiar with is the vinyl/CD debate that has raged for the past 25 years in the high-end audio world. The argument is this: because CD (and any digital technology) approximates a smooth sound wave through sampling – creating a stair-stepped approximation of the wave – it can never sound as natural as vinyl which produces smooth analogue sound waves.
I found myself thinking about this a while ago while watching John Adams on HBO. The dialogue has more nuance, more subtlety and more range than the typical dialogue of today. As a result, the type and quality of emotion and meaning that can be conveyed is greatly increased.
The trend of language in most countries has been towards simplification and coarsening, and while research is contested, many studies show that average vocabularies have been in decline for decades.
With the advent of social media, it feels that this trend has been exacerbated. Services like SMS, Twitter, IM and so on actively limit the kind of communication that’s possible. New service adocu takes this to the extreme with one word posts. Of course, this is not a one-sided story. In return we have greatly increased the quantity of words we use and consume, we have invented new words and (in the Web 2.0 world) we are increasingly relying upon metadata like tags to return nuance back to our communications.
However, this feels like the communication equivalent of sampling. It’s an approximation of analogue communication, using different levels of words to convey more meaning. Of course, as we’ve seen with music, going digital has many advantages. However, I predict an analogue communication movement to appear. Face to face communications sessions with lots of pauses, wry tones, innuendo and references to classical Greek literature.
