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Mind the Gap
New Programs Promise to Bridge
The Analog-to-Digital Divide

By Jeremy Wagstaff, Wall Street Journal
September 7, 2007
JAKARTA, Indonesia — If you’ve ever lost a receipt, tried to remember an important idea you had while driving, or pondered why people rattle off the vital information — their names and numbers — in voicemails so quickly you have to listen to them four times, then you’ve encountered something I’ll pompously call the Analog To Digital Gap. It’s when we can’t move something from atoms to bits as easily as we’d like.

And for some reason it’s still with us. We seem to have spent most of the past few years fiddling with what’s already digital. Web 2.0, the cutting edge of the online revolution, is mostly about sharing stuff that’s already in bit form: photos, videos, music, blogs — all that kind of thing. Very little effort, from what I can see, has been spent on actually getting stuff into that form.

True, there are exceptions. Who uses a camera with film anymore? Most of our snaps are digital, making it relatively easy to store, share and edit them. And a large proportion of music is now digital, meaning we can listen to it on our iPods. But neither media is particularly kind in helping us move our old analog photos, videos and music to a digital format. Services and products do exist, but they’re either expensive or time-consuming or both.

Then there’s the world we move around in. (more…)