Between November, 15th and November, 18th, 2016, the DOAG Conference and Exhibition will be for the 29th time in Nuremburg. I was there and was permitted to give a presentation – and I was also interviewed by DOAG-TV. Here are the questions and my answers:
When and where, as you see it, did digitalization basically begin?
For me, digitalization started with the “written language”. A few thousand years – maybe 5,000 years – after language had evolved, they found a way to write it down. Then came the information carriers for written language , such as papyrus, paper and IT, along with machines such as the printing press, the lead set and eventually the internet.
Incidentally, written texts were first used for business purposes (merchandize). Business is the inventor of all things – not war. If anything, war is just an extreme sort of business – and, as I see it, a totally questionable and perverted one.
Where are we today, and what does digitalization mean for the “analogous” creature “homo sapiens”?
Humans are and will always remain analogous creatures. Through the “cultural techniques” such as reading and writing, humans became a little digital. But never quite fully. After all, to this day humans cannot really manage to translate digital experiences into their analogous concepts of mind. Just think of the secret of the big number. Linear is hard enough, geometrical is quite difficult, logarithmic is impossible. Can you imagine how much money 200 quadrillion Euros is (it is the sum by which the EU countries indebt themselves anew each year)?
We lost the competence to calculate mentally or on paper as soon as the pocket calculator was invented. Who of us can still do it? Who can still extract a root or do a logarithmic value by hand?
Looking ahead: what will digitalization bring us?
Strangely enough, digitalization might actually make our lives analogue again. In former times, we translated digital data into analogous signals by modem (modulating and demodulating) before sending them on through a cable. And at the opposite end of the cable, the modem again re-translated them into digital data. Today, we translate analoous signals (noise and images) into digital data for transportation, split them into small data packages, send them through a package network, collect them and then re-arrange them in order to reconstruct the analogous signal from digital data (which is why we no longer have any static).
What will we have in the future?
- In communications: facilitation gets more and more important. We will have more images and less written words. We will talk more and draw and write less. Audio will become more and more relevant – also as part of asynchronous communication. Podcasts and video recordings will continue to grow.
- A “rudimentary illiteracy” will spread more and more. Language will benefit. Strong metaphors will become important, along with the awareness of “restricted code” and “elaborated code”.
- Control of language and gestures will become dominant.
Well, this is what the future might be like. Or maybe not. After all, we cannot predict the future.
So much about my interview! I will give a presentation at the DOAG Conference on Wednesday about “Digitalization – A Huge Error”. I already collected so much exciting material that I do not know what to tell people. That makes me nervous. But then, I will first be interviewed on Tuesday. As soon as my interview is online, I will, of course, set a link to it on the IF Blog. And I am quite curious what it will be in the end that I am going to talk about.
The picture was taken during my last presentation on the GOAG Conference of 2015.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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