The problem with digital is that they don’t understand analog

Image: Don Solo

Richard Huntington has done it again. He’s delivered another razor sharp post on Adliterate, this time about “digital” agencies standing with their pants down in the midst of what they assumed would be their hayday, the recession. Well, it didn’t quite turn out the way they had imagined – they weren’t quite as much the taste of the future and “traditional” agencies weren’t quite as much the whiff of the past as those charming lads had predicted.

Which makes me want to make a fairly obvious point: you don’t know jack just because you know flash. The world is still very much analog and it always will be. That is, if you – which is very useful – employ the communication theorist Paul Watzlawick’s meaning of the words “digital” and “analog”. Digital is the direct, conscious, verbal component of communication. Analog is everything else: visuals, sounds, gestures, body language, the non-direct, the non-conscious, the emotional, the irrational, the poetic. That which is said between the lines. That which is not articulated yet clearly communicated. That which makes humans human. So if you think the world is merely about ones and zeroes, cost-effective clicks and forward-leaning rationality, think again.

It also made me think of this old post. Ah, there’s nothing like patting oneself on the back.

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