Learning Objective 5
Digitization is the process of converting something from the natural world into a digital form. Text and sound are great examples of this process because they can both be represented digitally, but they require different processes.
Text is made of letters and symbols that can be turned into codes a computer can store, process, and display in a uniform way. Sound is a little more complicated because it is continuous in nature instead of being binary. To digitize sound, a computer must sample it, meaning it takes the sound at many different moments in time and then turns those samples into code. This means that to have more accuracy, we need more data so the computer can take more frequent samples and create a better representation of the original sound.
This made me realize that in technology, when something is not perfectly achieved, it is not always because we cannot do it. Often, it is because we need to find the right balance between cost, accuracy, amount of data, and fair representation. Digital versions can be extremely useful, but they are still representations of the original thing, not the original thing itself.