AHHH LUNENFIELD

In the reading of Screen Grabs: The Digital Dialect and New Media Theory, by Lunenfield he is explaining the relationship between the digital world and how new media (technology/ideas) have played off of each other over the decades that our civilization has become more advanced. Lunenfield knows here that the digital dialect is written in the ancient form of 0’s and 1’s which we call binary code, the language of technology. New media is the concept that the old technology is now obsolete and new media is created from scratch. Again, we see here that Lunenfield’s support of this argument simply forgets that the code is the same all around new or old since each technology needs to have a common language. He speaks of technology such as the camera and the first telephone (invented by Alexander Graham Bell) and states that the first models are old technology, long forgotten and remade into something more presentable. He breaks down the word down like a fraction and says, “…digital is more than simply a technical term to describes systems and media dependent on electronic computation…” (xv) which means that the digital age of technology goes further than automatic electronic computations that need no human involvement, “…just as the analog, which preceded it, describes more than a proportional system of representation…” (xv continued). He believes that the digital technology used today simply cannot be describes by the word ‘digital’ since more functions are occurring in the background of the operations. Man made such concept of quick, efficient, effortless technology available like the telephone and how it switched from signals being sent through a wire from room to room, to poles being built up and connecting cities, do the new digital phones we have to day that have built in receptors. The technology has changed yes, but the code of telephone signals has stayed the same throughout the ages.
Lunenfield has an obsession with relating how technology was and how technology is different today, that there has been this revolution of advancement and the root inventions have been long forgotten and new ideas and innovations are used to produce the same end result…efficiency. He knows that cultures are dependent technology and wants the world to realize that new media and the digital dialect are two separate entities that work off each other to mesh into the whole “electronic stew”. The stew consists of the mixture of all these things such as accessable information which is also stored, therefor mixing and creating the stew.