Moving bits and moving atoms

I realized again today how much of my life is spent with bits and not atoms. I seem to recall that the difference between the two really sank in for me with one of Neal Stephenson's writings, quite possibly his excellent In the Beginning was the Command Line, though I believe that Nicholas Negroponte brought up the ideas before that circa 1995 in Wired magazine and in Being Digital. (Shamelessly, if you buy stuff from Amazon via those links, I get cookies.)

We are creatures of the physical world. We necessarily must then concern ourselves with atoms. Food, shelter, clothing together all together nourishes and protects our forms. Not until we have intelligence and develop society do bits really matter, primarily as education, information and entertainment. When you buy a book, you buy a chunk of atoms that contain bits; the same is true of a DVD or a photograph, or newspaper. Speech makes its way into our brains via a medium of moving atoms.

Given the current state of the Internet, you can download a movie, a song, or an e-book, or watch video from across the country of your home. The stream of bits flows into you, and as a consequence of thinking and processing, the atoms within your brain change. Gutenberg captured bits in ink on paper; Edison in wax and celluloid. Interestingly, an invention of his begat the modern tattoo gun- another method of encoding information into atoms.

I read in an older column of Negroponte's how he had asked Penn Jillette to read his book for its production into an audiobook. When I went to check Amazon to confirm the fact (it is) and to discover if it remained in print (it isn't), I noticed that the top buy-me ad on the Amazon front page was for a home defibrillator- list two grand.

Such a device, housed in atoms, protects our form by shocking the heart with a common medium of bits- electricity. Once again, bits flow through us and change our atoms.

Bits fascinate me, no matter their containing atoms. An MP3 of your favorite song could exist magnetically on your hard drive, on the flash memory of a USB memory key, optically on a disc, printed out entirely on dead trees or even handwritten on stone in blood. A different representation of the song also would do just fine, no matter if printed as guitar tab or musical notes, or even the lyrics or title, to jar the brain into producing the memory of the song. For all I know, we could see scifi-style holographic memory cubes in five years.

Whenever I start thinking about bits and atoms, it all seems so terribly important, like I'm about to cross over and make an incredibly insightful observation about the human condition and what it Means in the Information Age. After a few minutes, it settles down and I realize that we're going to be stuck with translating bits to atoms for a long, long, time.