Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The digital devices we have can dominate our lives. That still doesn’t change a simple fact – this is an analog world inhabited by analog people.

We live in a digital world. Cell phones, Internet, digital cameras, digital video camcorders – all digital.

At its heart, the digital world comprises only two states: on and off, the one and the zero. The classic black and white. There are no shades of gray in here.

For many of us, this black and white won’t work. We want shades of gray, we want all the colors of the rainbow. We want some places in between where we can fit our individual preferences so we can be a little different and yet remain comfortably similar.

Setting preferences aside, we know the world is not on or off, one or zero, black or white. There is no edge to a drop of water or that distinct point in time when a child’s laugh changes to a cry. Those edges between two opposites don’t exist.

The digital world, however, lures us into believing that the one-zero world can exist. Enough ones and zeros approximate an analog world. Our computer screens have 16 million colors. Surely that is enough. What do we want, 16 million and one colors?

16 million colors are not good enough. We do want more; we can imagine mixing colors number 16,000,000 and 15,999,999. The heart and soul long for such.

And then there are all the people in the world. They are analog as well. They are a shade of happy one day and sad the next. They flip; they flip halfway, and they flop. They flip back and forth but never in a predictable or complete manner. The rules of digital logic don’t apply. What am I to do with these people?

I find myself more productive and at peace on days when I accept that the world and its inhabitants are analog. I expect mixtures of color and behavior. I expect the unpredicted. In a sense, that enables me to predict the unpredicted. Is that logical? Probably not, but it makes a circle in my thinking, and a circle is analog.

So I live in this analog world. I use all my digital tools to navigate my future path and record my past life. These digital tools are quite powerful, convenient, and useful. They, however, are only tools. I use them now and then in an analog manner for this is, after all, an analog world.