Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 35

because digital systems allow perfect reliability, so that once a system is in a digital
type (also called a 'digital state'), it does not change unless it is explicitly made to
change, allowing both flawless copying and perfect reliability. Haugeland reveals
the purpose of digitality to be “a mundane engineering notion, root and branch. It
only makes sense as a practical means to cope with the vagarities and vicissitudes,
the noise and drift, of earthy existence” (Haugeland 1981). Yet Haugeland does
not tell us what digitality actually is, although he tells us what it does, and so it
is unclear why certain systems like computers have been wildly successful due
to their digitality (as the success of analogue computers was not so widespread),
while others like 'integer personality ratings' have not been as successful. Without
a coherent definition of digitality, it is impossible to even in principle answer
questions like whether or not digitality is purely subjective (Mueller 2008). Any
information is digital when the boundaries in a particular encoding can converge
with a regularity in a physical realization . This would include sentences in a
language that can be realized by sound-waves or the text in an e-mail message that
can be re-encoded as bits, and then this encoding realized by a series of voltages.
Since the encoding of the information can be captured perfectly by a digital system,
it can be copied safely and effectively, just as an e-mail message can be sent many
times or a digital image reproduced countlessly.
To implement a digital system, there must be a small chance that the information
realization can be considered to be in a state that is not part of the discrete types
given by the encoding. The regularities that compose the physical boundary allows
within a margin of error a discrete boundary decision to be made in the interpretation
of the encoding. So, anything is capable of upholding digitality if that buffer created
by the margin of error has an infinitesimal chance at any given time of being in
a state that is not part of the encoding's discrete state. For example, the hands
on a clock can be on the precise boundary between the markings on the clock,
just not for very long. In a digital system, on a given level of abstraction, the
margin of error does not propagate upwards to other levels of abstraction that rest
on the earlier level of abstractions. Since we can create physical systems through
engineering, we can create physical substrata that have low probabilities of being in
states that do not map to digital at a given level of abstraction. As put by Turing,
“The digital computers...may be classified amongst the 'discrete state machines,'
these are the machines which move by sudden jumps or clicks from one quite
definite state to another. These states are sufficiently different for the possibility of
confusion between them to be ignored. Strictly speaking there are no such machines.
Everything really moves continuously” (Turing 1950). Analogue is the rather large
and heterogeneous set of everything that is not digital . This would include people,
such as Tim Berners-Lee himself, who can be represented but not realized as a
message, as well as places, like Mount Everest, whose precise boundaries are rather
indeterminate. While, according to Hayles, “the world as we sense it on the human
scale is basically analogue,” and the Web is yet another development in a long-line
of biological modifications and technological prostheses to impose digitalization on
an analogue world (2005). The vast proliferation of digital technologies is possible
because there are physical substrata, some more so than others, which support