Bits

The important thing to remember is that bits are bits. In the digital world there are no movies, magazines or pieces of music. There are just 1's and 0's, for which we did not even have a name until 1946 when Princeton statistician John Tukey fashioned the words binary and digit into the term "bit".

For the next 25 years, bits were of interest only to a few specialized members of the scientific community. Lately bits have become important to everybody because we can represent anything as bits—anything. Soon scientists will test digital versions of drugs on digital people rather than real ones.

Books, magazines and newspapers are not the meaningful element. Only words matter. And words are not going anywhere: they won't leave us. Words powerfully and efficiently communicate. A few words—i.e., a few bits—can create religions, can make war or peace. Words presented to the eye (instead of the ear) take the form of text. Traditionally, text could be presented only by printing it on paper, carving it in stone, or writing it with smoke.

Today we can do something new. We can reduce the text to bits (which we cannot see or hear), take this new representation and store it, manipulate it or transmit it, and then later render it on a computer display or a piece of paper. The same is true of music, movies, still photographs. Most people know this, but few realize that the quantity of bits vastly varies from one "message" or medium to another. For example, when you read a book, you consume perhaps 3 million bits an hour. When you look at television, you consume 3 million a second.

Bandwidth is the ability to move bits, broadband to move many bits per second. A common practice, comparing bandwidth to the diameter of a pipe is misleading. Pipes deliver water at a constant flow. However, we frequently need bits delivered in bursts. Even if we did consume bits steadily, it simply doesn't naturally follow that our computers need to receive information in the same fashion.

One of the most profound changes afforded by the digital world is the ability to be asynchronous, in the smallest and largest time scales. In the smallest sense, this allows us to use efficiently our channels of communications—for example, packetizing bits of sound so that many people may speak on the same channel. In the larger sense, we can expand and contract our personal time in new ways, leaving and receiving messages at mutual convenience. On a yet larger scale, social behavior will also become more asynchronous. Time loses its grip when, for example, people control when and where they work (home offices, flextime)—and even when they are ready to watch a TV show.