Today let’s talk about how products and services are moving from their analog forms (like 35mm film) to their digital forms (like .jpg image files). It’s a major shift brought about by the knowledge era and its products, the computer and the internet.
Consider film photography, buying vinyl records or CDs, or visiting the library to learn about a certain subject.
We don’t do these things as much today. The clearest example is in film photography – we now all have digital cameras on our phones, with no need to worry about how many shots we’ve taken before we have to reload the film, or send our film rolls to develop. Same for CDs – we don’t have to commit to buying a whole artist’s album, if we even buy anything. It’s all available on Youtube or Spotify or Apple Music, and instead of paying one artist, we pay one service for the ability to access any and all music that we might like. And for the library, instead of needing to make a trip down to look for the books the library owns on the topic, I could just search up ‘how to learn Photoshop’ on Google in a few seconds.
It’s really not to say that we don’t do these things. I still do all of the above. It’s just a lot less frequently than the average person 2 decades ago. But film photography, buying CDs and going to the library have taken on different meaning today, and I’ll cover this in another post.
The difference between services then and now is that of scarcity vs. abundance.
In the days of yore, resources were scarce, and you had to be mindful of that. How many shots left in the film? What books do the library own, and can I find what I need there? You’d also have to rely on the expertise of, well, experts, who owned the resources and domain knowledge to help you develop your film, sell your CDs, lend you books.
Versus now. There is immense abundance in resources that we have access to, because they’ve become digital. The internet allows us to pool together opinion blogs and video tutorials from all across the world. Photos don’t need film, and music doesn’t need records or CDs. So these things in the broad sense, photos, music, written work – they’re a lot easier to access, because the process of uploading and viewing them is more efficient.
Consider also the abundance of time we gain from using a phone camera over a film camera. With the phone, it’s 10 seconds to take your phone out, open the camera app (typically accessed from lock screen through one swipe), and press the button. But film? First you go to the film store to buy your rolls, then you load them into the camera, spend a while making sure your photo is perfect, then you bring them down to a studio to develop and have them scanned. It takes days. All this time has now been gained, because digitisation makes it far more efficient to convert light into pixels, and pixels into graphics on the screens we use.
Additionally, our ability to put photos and music and written work into a computer, put computers in everyone’s homes (and now pockets), and get those computers connected via the internet, has meant that these resources are also democratised in some way. Individuals can now teach and learn from others around the world, so long as you have a computer. And beyond the cost of the device, these resources can be obtained for free.
As a result, the main difficulty in obtaining resources is now that there’s simply too much for us to process. When taking photos with your phone, you might be inclined to spamming the shot to make sure there’s a non-blurry, perfect shot in there. Then you spend the time sifting through to pick the best one. You’d certainly not have the room to do this much spamming with film – film is expensive! So the difficulty of having such abundance, which arises because of ease of process, is finding quality among quantity.
When there’s so much abundance, we start looking for services that help us pick out what to look at. That’s why services like Google are so important. Google organises the very wide and messy internet for us – their mission is to “organise the world’s information”. Search functions in websites, recommendations on Youtube’s (and most websites’) home pages all help to solve the problem too.
The problems of abundance also explain the rise in pure review sites (Tripadvisor, Yelp, IMDB), and why product-selling sites always contain rating features on their products (Amazon, Youtube). Because there’s so much information, we need to know which product is the ‘best’ to purchase.
A lot of companies today concern themselves with this move from scarcity to abundance. Some are trying to move an industry from scarcity into abundance, like the many fintech startups and cryptocurrencies that attempt to shift personal finance and investing from banks into the hands of individuals. Other companies are trying to solve the problem of over-abundance by providing search and recommendations, like Google and the other examples listed above.
So that’s the summary of this huge shift from analog to digital, scarcity to abundance. Things are getting more convenient, more efficient, more optimal. We now have more information, and to balance that we have services helping us to organise that information.
joy wang 
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