Distinctive characteristics of digital media

Paradoxically, the unique ability of digital media to reduce all sorts of input to ones and zeros enables it to be like any other media: read like text, look like images and video, sound like audio, act like animation, and even behave semi-intelligently. This gives rise to the practice of the networked museum, which repackages traditional museum functions as information--albeit excitingly packaged--to be accessed.

There are other distinctive characteristics of digital media, however, that may differentiate the medium and provide a way to think about the digital museum a bit differently.

networked
When thought of as a property or process rather than as a conduit, the networked aspect of digital media implies:

  • Connectivity
  • Two-way
  • Point-to-Point
  • Real time
  • Decentralized
  • Information glut -> filter

interactivity
Whether it is due to conditioning or repulsion, with all the twitch games in the world, it is hard not to agree with Andre Simon. Nevertheless, interactivity is a revolutionary feature of digital media.

  • responsive
  • choice
  • hyperlinear
  • personal
  • multivocal
  • conversational
  • agency

computability

"... There is not one way of mapping the networked space of the web. I see the collection and interpretation of the data generated by people's navigation as an attempt to create the map that could be used to decode that data. I.e. the map that is created, is the map that could be used to better understand the map that is created. Maybe we have to allow recursive reasoning to begin to grasp the concept of networked space. (The importance of recursive loops for computing can not be overestimated.)
Lisa Jevbratt, interview for A Stillman Project for the Walker Art Center
The ability of digital media to act on itself allows one to think beyond a networked museum, beyond a constructed artificial reality, to a digital museum based on the distinctive characteristics of networking, interactivity, and computability. In other words, based on the ability to sustain engaged interactions.
Stillman project

What are some of the distinctive attributes of digital media?

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"The usefulness of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes."
Bob Metcalf, inventor of Ethernet


"When I hear the word 'interactive', I grab my gun. And shoot."
Andre Simon


"Computers both produce the material we experience and allow us to access it. The computer is a language machine. ... Turing simply defined the computer as a machine that could be any machine. It could be this because it was programmable--as such, operating symbolically upon symbolic things. This universe of symbolic forms includes the computer itself, and the recursive aspect of the medium is what leads to its real technological and therefore social power."
Simon Biggs, "On navigation and interactivity"