The difference between analog and digital isn’t like the difference between chalk and cheese.
Digital is either on or its off, a bit like cheese. Chalk is neither on nor off.
Here’s my top 10 reasons why analog beats digital hands down.
1. You can wind up an analog clock when it runs down and don’t need to run out and get an AA battery. Because people are analog, there are plenty of places in the world where convenience stores aren’t open 24 hours a day.
2. Sex is better in analog mode. You can’t turn people on and off with a switch.
3. Everything sounds better in analog mode. The downside is that it’s hard to get needles for your turntable so you can play your vinyl. Not even at the convenience store. How inconvenient.
4. Luckily, there are analog to digital converters (DACs) so you can shove quite a bit of analog stuff into your computer.
5. We’re not quite sure how far digitization has reached in the realm of smell. The smell of a rose, of the sea, and the taste of honey don’t seem to have a DAC yet.
William Blake’s Hekate
6. Digitized speech is quite cool. Enormous strides have been made over the last two decades. But it’s hard to introduce an emotional element into the utterances of personal computers. They seem to lack, er, personality. Speech recognition software has also progressed as if it was wearing seven league boots. But quite often, it doesn’t seem to quite grasp the nuances of the analog voice.
7. Artificial intelligence is the realm of the digital. But it’s also analog too. So many people profess to be intelligent, but it’s quite artificial.
8. Is God analog? Tricky one this. Newton compared God to a watchmaker, but nevertheless William Blake drew him as a naked man, bent over, using a pair of dividers. William Blake was analog. Now he’s dead, with many an epilog.
9. You can’t kiss a computer. Well you can. But if you do, you’re a sad digitoid.
10. Warm flesh is better than cold fish. Humanoids are better than Androids. Giggles are better than Googles. That’s an analog judgement. So there.
