This is the central idea of the book”being digital”, which is all about digitizing our world and allowing people to have a different, but also a more convenient lifestyle. For example, working and studying, which I believe take the most part of most people’s lives., could all surely be changed. Although no matter how much the technology develops and improves, the essence of these things, probably all about gaining salary and knowledge, might still be the same and won’t be changed forever. but everything else , including the process and method, could all change to a completely new form that we couldn’t even imagine, just because of digitization.
But what is digitalization? You might have learned this in middle school science, which is that everything in the world and even the universe is all made of a single thing — atoms. There are 118 of them as there are 118 different elements. quite a small number for such a large space, you might think.
But, have you ever thought of breaking this rule? In some way?
Not breaking down atoms into smaller pieces, which is actually not that hard as they are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. But changing the atoms to a different form.
This is actually possible, and the easiest proof is that you are able to read this article on a device.
However, You probably won’t know the reason by a single sentence, so have a think, if this article is in an actual book, which is made of atoms, can you see it on the internet or send it to someone else within a few seconds? No. So what is being transferred, is it still atoms? Again, no.
It is bits.
Now You might consider bits and atoms as the same type of things as they are both extremely small, but in fact, bits are totally different from atoms. Not because they have completely different names, but because instead of the basic unit of matter, bits are numerical values represented by the 1 and 0, which is known as binary. Although there are only 2 numbers present, they can still represent a lot of things such as true or false, on or off, yes or no…… (and if necessary, large numbers can also be converted to the form of 1 and 0). However, the most important thing is that they are invisible and weightless, which means that they could be transmitted at a very fast speed whenever the user wants to.
this could be more useful than you think, imagine you need to write an article that requires a lot of information that are only presented in related books, if you are lucky enough, you could spend over 5 hours searching for the whole library and finally got the information you want, and if you are not lucky, you might have to spend a lot of money buying the books from different places and then wait for an extremely long time to receive it, and the books could possibly be damaged on the way. But bits are totally different, if the books and information are being converted from atoms to bits, everything could be searched on the internet without spending extra money and time or being damaged physically at any time. And if the information isn’t specific enough or you don’t understand, you could also post your questions and people from worldwide can answer this by sharing their ideas and methods, so you could then read them and therefore share yours if you want to…… so other than transporting, bits also act as something that connects everyone in the whole world.
Now you might start to understand digitizing a bit more, which actually means taking samples from something then arrange them tightly, such as images, where you take pixels from them, and as there are a enormous amount of pixels, there will be no difference between images ( digital ) and things that you see in the real world (analog ). But the problem is, there are a lot of non-atom based things in this world now that couldn’t be converted to bits, such as managing, as it is an action, not something that actually exists. But does this mean that digitizing has no effects on businesses? No. Now think of some of the most successful businesses in the world, you will realize that they, for example, e-commerce and websites, all depend on bits more than atoms. And even if something still can’t be converted to bits now, such as clothes, the business can still use bits to advertise their products worldwide and therefore attract more customers…… However, there are still a lot of other things in the world that are being affected by the bits and getting better because of this.
Digitalizing might not change everything, but it will certainly change something that is relatively important, at least. And as more and more things are starting to be digitized, bits could lead to infinite possibilities in the future.