The digitisation of material, analogue-world information

In a process that started in the 1980s but gained speed (culminating in the early 2000s), humanity is digitising all material information found in the analogue world (an act of processing collections of information, see §02.00.02 and §02.00.06). This includes both information that has been created by humans over the course of their history (i.e. artefacts) and information created by Nature (trees, lakes, rivers, animals etc.). In essence the digitisation of material, analogue-world information presupposes that it first be dematerialised before it is re-materialised in a digital format. However, crucially, this re-materialisation of material information into digits is not unique, in the sense that the dematerialisation that preceded it, and upon which the digitisation is based, takes one form among the many that are possible. In other words, the result of the digitisation of an artefact (e.g. a table) is neither unique nor exclusive, because it is based on a dematerialisation (most likely, in the form of a photo of the object) that is one among the many possible—meaning that it can be digitised many times over. (On (the vastly smaller category of) IP-protected Things (for instance, when the IP-protected design of a chair would be the basis for its digitisation), see §01.01.15 and §01.01.16) Similarly, the digitisation of, for example, the remains of an ancient temple is not unique—another attempt at its digitisation by another group of archaeologists would produce a second result, existing in parallel to the first one. In other words, while the digitisation of material, analogue-world information leads to a digital reproduction of the original, it is only one digital reproduction among many possible others—it is not the original itself. In other words, a single dataset in the analogue world can lead (through its digitisation) to a potentially infinite number of datasets in the digital world.

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