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What's Going On?

In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, director of MIT's Media Lab, published a book titled Being Digital, which popularized one of his pet rants: bits vs atoms. The new world of digital networks vs the old world of things. In speeches and media interviews, Negroponte made sweeping pronouncements:

The future of all of our businesses is the difference between atoms and bits.

Underneath this hype is a very important distinction. If you understand and remember it, you can apply it to answer questions such as "How do the traditional 4 P's of marketing hold up on the Web?" and "Does the FBI need Carnivore for law enforcement?"

This basic distinction is one you can keep coming back to when you need to understand what's going on.

What is hardware?

It's made out of atoms, mostly carbon (plastic casings), silicon (chips), and copper (wire).

What is software?

It's made out of bits. Most of it is hideous, appalling, insulting ... 

... hideously difficult to use, appallingly complex to understand, and insultingly marketed.

Definitions

Bit | The irreducible unit of information.

Atom | A unit of matter, until recently considered irreducible.

In Blown to Bits, Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster explain (p. 15) the difference between information (bits) and things (atoms). 

When a thing is sold, the seller ceases to own it; when an idea, a tune, or a blueprint is sold, the seller still possesses it and could possibly sell it again. Information can be replicated at almost zero cost without limit; things can be replicated only through the expense of manufacturing. Things wear out: their performance deteriorates with wear and tear; information never wears out, although it can become unfashionable, obsolete, or simply untrue. A thing exists in a location and therefore a unique legal jurisdiction; information (as would-be censors and tax authorities are discovering) is nowhere and everywhere. 

Atoms are on the Periodical Table of Elements. They are made mostly of space so they also fill space, take up room. They can be in only one place at a time. A library book is made out of atoms and can be stolen and overdue. Our word comes from the Greek atomos, indivisible.

Bit is an acronym for either Binary Information uniT or for BInary digiT, depending on whom you ask. Binary means yes/no, one/zero, etc. Eight bits have 256 permutations.

Eight bits is more than enough to represent our whole digital code, in English, at least, that is, the upper and lower case alphabet, all ten numbers including zero, all common punctuation marks, and a few special characters thrown in.

Eight bits equals one byte. Bits are expressed with a small b and bytes with a large B. If your modem has a capacity of 56,000 bits per second, that's often represented as 56 Kbps. That's the same as 7 KBps.

Atoms are heavy and slow. To move them is difficult. Important early developments like the wheel, lever, and sail let puny humans move lots of atoms, for example, the pyramids in Egypt. The "revolution" came in the mid-1800's when Samuel Morse sent bits (a binary dash or dot) along a copper wire at approximately 2/3 the speed of light.

A "book" made out of bits cannot be stolen or overdue though your access to them can certainly be forbidden while they're "checked out".

analog, digital

There's reality. A cat is real. Then there are representations of reality. A drawing of a cat is "analogous" to the real cat. It's also highly redundant. Erase two legs and the tail and it will still signify "cat". Early writing used such pictures before they came to denote syllables. Around five thousand years ago, people started using alphabets. They are digital. The word "cat" is a digital representation of a cat. It's discrete and not even a little bit redundant. Take a third of it away, say the C, and it's not a "cat" any more, it's an "at".

A digital measurement is precise and exact. Either one or zero. There's no one and a half or a little less than zero. An analog measurement is continuous and approximate. 

Do not equate analog with atoms and digital with bits and say that analog is old and digital is very recent. Humans have been using digital coding for some four or five thousand years. In English, we use 26 letters, 10 numbers, and a couple of punctuation marks. In Geek speak, we use ones and zeros. You can make a convincing argument that "information" as we know it is only as old as this digital coding.

In common use, "digital" means anything on a computer. The telephone system is analog. The frequency of your voice is duplicated along an electrical circuit. Music on vinyl or tape is analog. A CD is digital.

old media, new media

Old media captures information in atoms and uses a one-to-many distribution model. New media captures information in bits and uses a many-to-many distribution model.

You may perceive sound, images, words, and numbers. To the computer, however, they're a string of bits, ones and zeros. While some images and words are better and more useful to you than others, bits are bits. The computer places no more value on one stream of bits than the other unless you tell it to.

scalable, extensible

A balloon is scalable; blow it up. A balloon is also extensible; tie it to the end of a stick and wave it at a parade. What makes computers and the Internet scalable? Moore's Law

Resources

From 1993 to 1998, Negroponte wrote a series of columns for Wired magazine. The columns are collected on Negroponte's MIT site. While the book Being Digital, being atoms, is outdated, these columns develop some of these ideas.

Julian Matthews interviewed Negroponte in 1996 for Malaysian Technology magazine. You can read the transcript, Why Bits Matter, on Julian's Tripod site.

What are some forward-thinking applications of the difference between bits and atoms? In 1997, Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer presented a fascinating exploration, Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits, and Atoms, at the annual Computer-Human Interaction conference in Atlanta.

Open Book Systems, ("to explore and develop the Internet as a publishing platform and business environment in its own right"), has published chapter excerpts from Being Digital. Two durable and relevant excerpts are The Paradox of a Book and Bits and Atoms.

To get you started, here are some excerpts from these excerpts.

Many people think they are in the atom business, but really what they make are bits. Newspapers, books, magazines. They manufacture bits but history has had them delivering atoms. Newspaper reporters send in stories from remote terminals, editors work on terminals, page layout and so on. It's all in digital form. Then at one point it's turned into ink put onto dead trees. Then we use child labor to get it to the reader.

That is an industry that will change very rapidly.

If there is anyone here that makes cashmere sweaters ... the chance of changing cashmere into bits and sending them along the information highway and reconstituting them as atoms is about 200 years away.

Ask yourself how much of your core business is based on bits and on atoms?

The rate of change that you will see in your industry is directly proportional to that relationship.

Not long ago I attended a management retreat for senior executives of PolyGram in Vancouver, British Columbia. The purpose was to enhance communications among senior management and to give everybody an overview of the year to come, including many samples of soon-to-be-released music, movies, games, and rock videos. These samples were to be shipped by FedEx to the meeting in the form of CDs, videocassettes, and CD-ROMs, physical material in real packages that have weight and size. By misfortune, some of the material was held up in customs. That same day, I had been in my hotel room shipping bits back and forth over the Internet, to and from MIT and elsewhere in the world. My bits, unlike PolyGram's atoms, were not caught in customs.

The information superhighway is about the global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light. As one industry after another looks at itself in the mirror and asks about its future in a digital world, that future is driven almost 100 percent by the ability of that company's product or services to be rendered in digital form. If you make cashmere sweaters or Chinese food, it will be a long time before we can convert them to bits. "Beam me up, Scotty" is a wonderful dream, but not likely to come true for several centuries. Until then you will have to rely on FedEx, bicycles, and sneakers to get your atoms from one place to another. This is not to say that digital technologies will be of no help in design, manufacturing, marketing, and management of atom-based businesses. I am only saying that the core business won't change and your product won't have bits standing in for atoms.

In the information and entertainment industries, bits and atoms often are confused. Is the publisher of a book in the information delivery business (bits) or in the manufacturing business (atoms)? The historical answer is both, but that will change rapidly as information appliances become more ubiquitous and user-friendly. Right now it is hard, but not impossible, to compete with the qualities of a printed book.

A book has a high-contrast display, is lightweight, easy to "thumb" through, and not very expensive. But getting it to you includes shipping and inventory. In the case of textbooks, 45 percent of the cost is inventory, shipping, and returns. Worse, a book can go out of print. Digital books never go out of print. They are always there.