Naturespace | Blog

Much of what we experience these days is digital. Broadcast television is now completely digital. Most audio is digital. And everything you do on the Internet is digital. Most people know this. But, after contemplating this most obvious of concepts for a while, it occurred to me that all of these things have no mass.

Digital means that something is converted into numbers, or more specifically, a particular sequence of numbers. If you arrange the 0’s and 1’s in just the right way, you get a Spongebob Squarepants episode. When you purchase something on the Internet that is to be downloaded, such as Naturespace audio, or a movie off of iTunes, you are essentially purchasing a specific numerical sequence of zeros and ones, which, in and of itself, has no mass. But it does take up space. And each time it is copied, it takes up more space. There are many of these numerical sequences that are sold on the Internet.

Now it’s not as if you were out of zero’s and needed to buy more, or that you have all these leftover 1’s around from your Spongebob purchase last week because you used more zero’s watching it. You already have the 0’s and 1’s on your hard drive or whatever, you just need to arrange them correctly. Once the numerical sequence is created, it can be disseminated and copied easily, only requiring the energy to transfer the numbers, but not actually existing in the world the way that doughnut you are eating does. Want to eat that doughnut again? Gotta buy/make/get another. Wanna watch Spongebob again? Just run the numbers.

The digitizing of data has made it into something much more analogous to thoughts and ideas: mass-less information. Text used to require a page in a book, now it just appears on the screen. It seems like the world is becoming a lot more like a brain every day.