What's Digital All About?

Remember those Star Trek episodes "Scotty, beam me up!" ?

We humans have always dreamed of "beaming" ourselves, objects or even travel in time. In fact, every morning I travel on the London Underground to work, I ask myself how the world would look like, if we could all be "beamed". But that's all science fiction - everybody would agree!

Not me. The world is currently coming apart. It divides itself in huge steps into what we would call the material and the virtual world. And absurdly while it splits into those two, somehow the borders between material and virtual world blur.

With virtual world I am not referring to Second Life, GTA, the Habbo Hotel or anything alike. The virtual world is the world where everybody is connected to each other and different mechanics and laws of physics play. The virtual world is the world of digital communication. The one on your e-mail client, on your iPod, your MSN Messenger, your Skype, your internet browser, your computer desktop or even your mobile phone.

And in the world of digital objects, "beaming", traveling in time (at least backwards), copying, replicating, distributing, referencing, linking, contextualizing, tracking, recording, remixing, archiving, searching, tagging, ordering, twisting and destroying is all too common.

That's because all can be wrapped in ones and zeroes. And there's a lot that you can do with ones and zeroes.