DIGITAL

Digital age is when you make all your friends on the Internet, write to them for about a year before you send snail mail, or see what they look like, or talk to them on the phone, or meet them at camp. Digital children like us have to use our imaginations more as well, because contact on the Internet is a lot harder in some ways. Digital children who have friends that live thousands of miles away, like me, can often be lonely and sad, but won't admit to it. I'm not sure why yet... They also spend a lot of money on phone bills, plane and train tickets, and camps that are held all the way across the country. That's my digital life. How do you explain digital? -wanderlust

Digital is when I enter my room and flip on my computer, connecting to #nbtsc, to see whose on. It's being able to wave hello somehow to to those people whom I've never met, and follow daily events in their lives. Digital is being able to tell my story to them and hear their stories. Its knowing there is that other group to cry to, to run to when I need help, and to laugh with. And its about wishing that I could hold them in my arms as they cry... - Christy (aka Siliny Kaline)

Digital is: Analogue's counterpart. ~Reanna

Digital is Analogue. Just a neat, quantized, easy to grasp form of it. (Ari)

Really? Please explain... and while I'm asking, how would you explain the differences between digital and analogue in simple terms? I get the gist of it myself, but when I've tried differentiate for someone else, I haven't had much luck. ~Reanna

Analogue is a lot like the word Universe. It simply means 'everything' in a lot of ways. All waves are analogue, by definition. A 'digital' wave is just pulses of analogue waves (simplistically, there's other ways to represent digital data in analogue space). Basically, all digital waves are analogue too, but not all analogue waves are meaningful digital data... therefore, digital is a special subset of analogue, not an opposite.

A digital wave has two states an 'on' or 'off' (btw, 'digital' is a terrible term. Binary makes much more sense..) ... Analogue has an infinite number of states. For a wave to be 'valid' binary data as well, it just has to be more-or-less obviously "on" or "off" in some way. (be it strong vs weak, on or off, high or low frequency). That's the difference... with analogue, the signal can be 'close'... with digital, it either is or isn't.

My dad was so impressed by your definition, he thinks you must have looked it up. Did you? :) reanna