ABSTRACT
The distinction between analog and digital formats is crucial to new media. Analog information, such as a sound wave, is a continuous stream of data: digital information, on the other hand, is discrete, with distinct breaks between one piece of data and the next. A common analogy is to compare analog processes to rolling down a hill and digital ones to walking down steps. In practice, digitisation represents most information as bits, or binary digits: on/off, 1/0. There is no intrinsic value to a bit other than the fact that it represents a state of an electronic circuit: nearly all information travelling around a typical computer consists of bits, ones and zeros, but these different streams of binary numbers are then output as words, images, audio files or videos depending on how they are interpreted by software.
