Bits and Pieces.

What exactly is a bit?

Nicholos Negroponte of MIT defines "bit" on page 14 of Being Digital: "A bit has no color, size, or weight, and it can travel at the speed of light. It is the smallest atomic element in the DNA of information. It is a state of being: on or off, true or false, up or down, in or out, black or white. For practical purposes, we consider a bit to be a 1 or a 0." This idea of a "bit,” a single one or zero floating around in a platonic realm, contradicts our intuitive notion of information storage.

There is a subtle point I must add here. Technically, digital information (information in the form of bits) does not exist independently of a physical medium. We merely treat it this way because it is independent of any particular medium. A chunk of data expressed in ones and zeros can exist in the form of electrons moving through a circuit, a series of X's and 0's written on a wall, an arrangement of rocks, or a series of guttural noises. These can all represent 1's and 0's, and thus an identical series of 1's and 0's expressed by each of these varied means is always exactly the same piece of information. If one were to imagine information conversion between media as a game of telephone among friends, one can understand digital information as clear, succinct English words repeated from ear to ear. Analogue information, however, might consist of a sequence of clear yet undefined noises and syllables. One cannot use discrete words to express every wisp of meaning implied by the particular expression of these sounds, and so the message quickly evolves as it goes around the circle of friends.

On page 164 of Digital Mosaics, Steven Holtzman describes the limitations of digital information:

Even when an extremely fine resolution grid is applied to create a discrete digital representation of some analog form; even if our experience of a digital world seems continuous -- it’s not. Ultimately there is a 1 or a 0. By its nature, the digital world is discontinuous, so there will always be a gap of some sort in any digital representation.

There are other ways to represent information. But if they're not in binary form, they're not digital in the way we understand the digital today. We may one day have other options -- biocomputers; neoanalog computers. And these in turn may open up new possibilities and new worlds. Today, however, when we peel away the layers of a digital world, strip it down to the equivalent of the flatness of Stella's canvas, we find only the binary nature of digital processes. This is the true limit of the digital world: it cannot represent anything that is not ultimately reducible to either 0 or 1.