Is the digital representation of an object ever as good as the original analog object? Or are there some hidden tradeoffs? Every new and amazing technological advancement almost always has some sort of tradeoff. Remember how in a previous post, I explained that a cellphone is a digital representation of a telephone because it can separate the signal from the noise by transmitting numbers representing the original signal. Even though the signal is recreated with the numbers, something is always lost from the original signal, no matter how much you try to get it to be exactly the same as the original. However, there are also tradeoffs with the analog version because even though the original signal is being transmitted, all of the noise in the background distracts from the voice and makes it harder to hear and understand.
The human perception influences the decisions we make when we digitize something. If people want a clear-sounding phone call and don’t exactly care that it isn’t the exact same as the original person’s voice, they will be happy that the message still came across and will likely barely notice any small mistakes in quality. By digitizing the world around us, some quality is lost but there are also doors that open to new possibilities with technology that have never before been possible with an analog way of life.
