What does Bitworld mean?

We often say that the industrialization era is the atomic era and the information technology era is the bit era. Why do you say that? As we all know, atoms make up molecules and molecules make up matter. So we also call the industrial age the material age. Then why do we call the information age the bit age? Here, we need to explain what a bit is: a bit is the smallest unit of counting in a computer; When we input any letter of English into the computer, it takes up a byte, and a byte is made up of bits. Chinese characters are very complicated. When we input a Chinese character into the computer, it takes up two bytes. So we don't call informatization the bit age, sometimes it is also called the digital existence age.

The best way to understand the value and influence of "digital existence" is to think about the difference between "bit" and "atom".

Although we undoubtedly live in the information age, most information is distributed in the form of atoms, such as newspapers, magazines and books (such as this book).

Our economy may be turning to the information economy, but when measuring the scale of trade and recording fiscal revenue and expenditure, many atoms will still come to mind.

GATT (General Agrimony and Trade) is completely around atoms.

Recently, I visited the headquarters of a company, which is one of the largest integrated circuit manufacturers in America.

When I checked in at the front desk, the receptionist asked me if I had my laptop.

Of course I brought one.

So, she asked me the model, serial number and value of this computer.

"Probably worth 1 10,000 to 2 million dollars!"

I said.

She replied, "No, sir, that's impossible.

What are you talking about? Let me see. "

I showed her my old "Power-Book" computer, and she estimated that it was worth about $2,000.

She wrote down this number before she let me in.

The crux of the matter is that atoms are not worth that much money, while bits are almost priceless.

Not long ago, I attended the management seminar for senior managers of Polaroid (Po 1yGram) held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The purpose of this meeting is to promote the communication between senior managers, and at the same time let everyone have an overall concept of the company's plans for the coming year, so many upcoming music works, movies, video games and rock music videos are displayed.

They entrusted FedEx to deliver these packaged CDs, videos and CDs to the meeting place. They are very heavy and bulky.

Unfortunately, part of the package was released by the customs.

The significance of the information superhighway is that the speed of light transmits weightless bits all over the world.

When industries look around and ask themselves "What is my future in the digital world", in fact, their future depends on whether their products or services can be converted into digital forms.

If you make cashmere sweaters or China food, there is still a long way to go to turn the products into bits.

Like the people in StarTrek, it is fascinating to turn into a beam of light at any time, but I am afraid it will not be realized for hundreds of years.

So, you still have to send atoms from one place to another by fedex, bike or walk.

This is not to say that digital technology will be useless in design, manufacturing, marketing and management in atom-based industries.

I'm just saying that the core characteristics of these industries will not change, and the atoms in their products will not be converted into bits.

In the information and entertainment industry, bits and atoms are often confused.

Do book publishers belong to the information transmission industry (transmitting bits) or manufacturing industry (making atoms)? In the past, the answer was both, but this will soon change when information equipment becomes more and more common and easy to use.

It is still difficult (though not impossible) for information equipment to compete with the quality of a book.

Books are not only clearly printed, but also light in weight, easy to read and not too expensive.

However, in order to deliver the book to your hands, you must go through various links such as transportation and storage.

Taking textbooks as an example, 45% of the cost is the cost of inventory, transportation and return.

To make matters worse, printed books may be out of stock.

Digital e-books will never be like this. They always exist.

The risks and opportunities faced by other media are even closer at hand.

The first entertainment atoms replaced by bits will be videos of video rental points.

Video rental is inconvenient, that is, consumers have to return these atoms, and if they forget to return them, they will have to pay a fine (it is said that 3 billion of the turnover of the video rental industry in the United States comes from fines).

Due to the convenience of digital products, economic compulsion and deregulation, other media will also go digital, and its speed will be very fast.

What exactly is a bit? Bits have no color, size or weight and can travel at the speed of light.

Just like human DNA, it is the smallest unit of information.

Bit is a state of being: on or off, true or false, up or down, in or out, black or white.

For practical purposes, we think that the bit is "1" or "0".

The meanings of 1 and 0 should be discussed separately.

In early calculation, a string of bits usually represents digital information (numeric1informative).

If all numbers except 1 and 0 are skipped during counting, the results will be: 1,1,1,100,10/,.

These numbers are expressed in binary 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and so on.

Bits have always been the basic particles in digital computing, but in the past 25 years, we have greatly expanded the binary vocabulary to include many things besides numbers.

More and more information such as audio and video is digitized and restored to the same 1 and 0.

Digitizing a signal means sampling from it.

If we arrange these samples closely, we can almost completely reproduce the original state.

For example, a music CD, the sound is sampled 44 100 times per second, and the waveform of sound wave (the sound pressure can be measured like voltage) is recorded as discrete numbers (these numbers are converted into bits).

When the bit string is reproduced at a speed of 44 100 times per second, the original music can be played again in a continuous tone.

Because the interval between these continuous syllables is very short, we can't hear separate scales in our ears, but completely continuous tunes.

The same is true for black and white photos.

You just need to imagine the principle of electronic camera as making an accurate grid on an image, and then recording the gray level of each grid.

Suppose we set the value of all black to 1 and the value of all white to 255, then any gray shadow will be in between.

There are exactly 256 permutations of "1" and "0" in an 8-bit binary group, namely from to11165438.

With this tight grid and detailed light and dark levels, images that are difficult to distinguish with the naked eye can be perfectly reproduced.

However, if the grid you use is rough, or the light and dark levels are not fine enough, then you will see digital gouges, that is, faintly visible contours and mottled particles.

The principle of generating continuous images from a single pixel is very similar to the common phenomenon in the material world, but the process is more detailed.

Matter is made up of atoms, but if we look at the smooth metal surface treated at the subatomic level, we will see many potholes.

The metal in our eyes is smooth and solid only because its composition is very small.

The same is true of digital products.

However, the world we experience in our daily life is actually very "simulated".

From a macro point of view, the world is not digital at all, but has the characteristics of continuity, which will not suddenly switch on and off, will not go from black to white, and will not directly jump from one state to another without crossing.

From a microscopic point of view, this may not be the case, because the objects that interact with us (electrons flowing in wires or photons in our eyes) are separate units.

However, because they are too numerous, they seem to be continuous.

This book contains almost 1 atom (the book is an extremely simulated medium).

Digitalization has many advantages.

The most obvious functions are data comparison and error correction, which are even more important if the information is transmitted on a very expensive or noisy channel.

For example, with this function, the TV broadcasting industry can save a lot of money, and viewers can also receive high-quality pictures and sounds.

However, we gradually found that the impact of digitalization is far more than that.

When we use bits to describe sound and images, just like saving energy, the less bits we use, the better.

But the number of bits used per second or per square inch will directly affect the fidelity of music or images (fide 1ity).

Generally, we all want to use high-resolution (reso 1ution) digital technology in some applications, while in other applications, only low-resolution sounds and pictures are enough.

For example, we want to print color images with high-resolution digital technology, but computer-aided aidedpagelayout does not need high resolution.

It can be seen that the economic system of bits is partly limited by the medium in which bits are stored and transmitted.

The number of bits transmitted per second on a specific channel (such as copper wire, radio spectrum or optical fiber) is the bandwidth of that channel.

The number of bits that each pipeline can accommodate can be measured accordingly.

This number, or capacity, must be carefully matched with the number of bits needed to present some data (sound, music, video): for transmitting high-quality sound, 64000 bits per second is a considerable number; Transmitting 1.2 million bits per second is more than enough for highfidelitymusic; But if you want to transmit images, the bandwidth must reach 45 million bits per second, so as to produce excellent results.

However, in the past 15 years, we have mastered the digital technology of compressing the original sound and image by examining bits separately or simultaneously from the perspective of time and space and removing their inherent redundancy.

In fact, all media have been digitized rapidly. One of the reasons is that we developed advanced compression technology earlier than most people predicted.

Until 1993, some Europeans were still arguing that the dream of digital images would not be realized until the next century.

Five years ago, most people didn't believe that we could compress the digital image information of 45 million bits per second to1.20 thousand bits per second.

But by 1995, we can already compress, decompress and encode such huge digital image information according to this ratio, and the cost is low and the quality is good.

It's like we suddenly got the knack of making Italian cappuccino powder. This thing is so wonderful that as long as it is brewed with hot water, we can enjoy the same mellow taste as the newly brewed coffee in Italian cafes.

The digital media world allows you to add information to correct mistakes (telephone noise, radio interference or TV snowflakes) when transmitting signals.

As long as a few extra bits are added to the digital signal and the increasingly mature error correction technology is adopted, it can play a corresponding role due to the difference of noise and medium, and these interferences can be removed.

On the CD, use the comparison of 1/3 to correct the error.

The same technology can also be applied to today's TV sets, so that every family can receive pictures with studio effect, and the images are much clearer than now, so that you may mistake this kind of TV for the so-called "HDTV".

Error correction and data compression are the two most obvious reasons for developing digital TV.

With the same bandwidth, it used to accommodate only one noisy analog TV signal, but now it can accommodate four high-quality digital TV signals.

Not only is the picture quality better, you may have four times the audience and four times the advertising revenue by using the same channel.

When most media managers think and talk about the significance of digitalization, they never forget that what is available can be spread in a better and more efficient way.

But like a Trojan horse, the consequences of this gift may be unexpected.

Because of digitalization, brand-new program content will appear in large quantities, new competitors and new economic models will also appear, and it is possible to give birth to a family industry that provides information and entertainment.

When all media are digitized, because bits are still bits, we will observe two basic but immediate results.

First of all, bits can be easily mixed with each other and reused simultaneously or separately.

The mixing of sound, image and data is called "multimedia" (mu 1timedia). This term sounds complicated, but in fact, it only refers to mixed bits.

Second, a new bit form is born, which will tell you something about other bits.

It is usually a kind of "message header", which can explain the content and characteristics of the following information. Newspaper reporters who often draw up a "summary title" for each report to show the news content are familiar with this thing.

Authors of academic papers are also familiar with such titles, because academic journals often ask them to summarize the main points of the papers.

On your CD, you can also find simple titles, so that you can jump directly from one song to another, and sometimes you can get more information about music from it.

These bits can't be seen or heard, but they can tell you that your computer or special entertainment equipment on the stage has sent something related to the signal.

These two phenomena, mixed bits and bits about bits, have completely changed the media world.

In contrast, applications such as video on demand (VOD) and video games transmitted by cable TV channels are dwarfed-they are just the tip of the huge iceberg.

Think about it, if TV programs are converted into data, which also contains self-descriptions about programs that computers can read, what will it mean? You can record what you want regardless of time and channel.

Furthermore, what if this digital description allows you to choose the form of the program at the receiving end-whether it is sound, video or text data? If we can move bits so easily, what good will big media companies do to you and me? These are all possible situations caused by digitalization.

It opens up infinite possibilities, and unprecedented programs will stand out from the brand-new resource combination.

Where is wisdom? Television broadcasting has a typical feature: all wisdom is concentrated on the starting point of information transmission.

It represents a kind of media.

The information disseminator decides everything, and the receiver can only accept nothing.

In fact, as far as the function per cubic inch is concerned, TV is probably the dumbest electrical appliance in your home at present (I haven't counted TV programs yet).

Your microwave oven may have more microprocessors than your TV.

Instead of imagining that TV in the future will have higher resolution, brighter colors, or be able to receive more programs, it is better to regard it as a change in the distribution of wisdom-or, more accurately, to transfer some wisdom from the communicator to the receiver.

As far as newspapers are concerned, the transmitter also has all the wisdom.

However, big newspapers have more or less avoided the problem of information simplification, because different people can read newspapers in different ways at different times.

We browse the newspaper page by page according to different titles and photos. Although newspapers send the same bit to thousands of readers, everyone's reading experience is quite different.

One way to explore the digital future is to see if the nature of media can be transformed into each other.

Can the experience of watching TV be closer to the experience of reading newspapers? Many people's party newspaper news is more in-depth than TV reports.

Is this inevitable? Similarly, people think that watching TV can get a richer court experience than reading newspapers.

Do we have to do this? The answer depends on whether we can develop a computer that can filter, classify, arrange and manage multimedia. This computer will read newspapers and watch TV for people, and it can also act as an editor at people's request.

This wisdom can exist in the sender and the receiver.

When wisdom is hidden by the sender, it's like you hired a special writer-just like The New York Times customized a newspaper for you according to your interests.

In this case, the information transmitter will specially screen out a set of bits for you and send them to you after filtering. You can print them out at home, or choose to watch them in a more interactive way on the electronic screen.

Another situation is to establish a news editing system at the receiving end. The New York Times sends out a lot of bits, which may include 5,000 different articles. Your electronic device extracts the part you want according to your interests, habits or plans for the day.

In this example, wisdom exists on the receiver side, and the sender treats all bits equally and sends them to all people.

The future will not be one of the two, but both will coexist.

The City of Babel in Bitter World

Bit reductionism is particularly interested in such a moving picture: the flow of bits has no national boundaries, and it can bypass the sea.

Pass the inspection and reach anywhere in the world. Many people understand this as the transmission of information can transcend traditional geographical and cultural boundaries.

The world, it can be enjoyed by all people. Because of Bite, our world has become a veritable global village.

The idea of a global village reminds me of the world mentioned in Chapter 66 of Laozi: neighboring countries face each other and chickens and dogs compete.

Smell makes people die of old age. Don't touch it. We now seem to live in such a world: Internet residents from different countries pass through.

The electronic screen connected to the network sees other countries and hears voices coming from them. Of course, because people don't have to walk,

So you can die of old age and not talk to each other.

However, such a global village has not yet fully become a reality. Of course, we can't tell the chickens barking and dogs barking all over the world.

No, there are different dialects, but we know that people from different countries or nationalities have completely different natural languages. Internet residents are

Send or receive information through various words and images appearing on the display instead of bit strings. The input of these words

Readers or readers obviously belong to different countries. If you like, you can go to the White House or the Louvre in Paris.

Travel. This is something that many online readers talk about. The problem is, if you don't know English (let alone French), no.

I know the White House is the White House and the Louvre is the Louvre. How can I get there?

Of course, you can check their website:/1233 1.html.

Duan yongchao: instrumentalization, sanctification and fragile bit world (Ⅱ);

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