A Guide to City Life #2.5 - Digitization

Welcome to the Guide to City Life # 2.5 - "Digitization". In this module, you will learn how everything in the Universe is made up of matter, and how this matter has a ghost, called the Digital World.

A great God-King of old has had his name and deeds inscribed, via much slave-artisan labour, onto a might rockface. His glory shall last forever. We, petty, inscribe our girlish whimpers and cholics onto an ethereal medium, more fragile than a butterfly's wing, and we will be largely forgotten within the year.

Are you on the internet right now? If so, you are a nerd.

A book, common receptacle for tales of high adventure and cooking advice alike, can be "digitized". This means that it is opened, scanned or transcribed by a sweaty intern, quality checked by an even sweatier, fatter intern, and then placed onto a website or internet piracy den for distribution to the masses, where it will sit, unread, on hard drives and portable computers for as along as the fad for "literacy" is still a thing. We do not think this weird trend, a mere 3000 years old, will last much longer.

A word on optical character recognition, or OCR. OCR is a spell that checks the orthography of scanned images, transcribing coffee-stained pages of 18th century table-talk into hyperlinked text with random numbers and formatted so erratically as to please any Russian futurist.

What is Big Data? A single datum is a small cannibalistic tribesman that lives in your monitor. When a datum eats another datum, it becomes a data. When it has eaten enough, it becomes the Big Data of the tribe. The Big Data is not the same thing as the Chief Data or the Shaman Data.

If you spill water on your computer or laptop, it will die. Furthermore, you will forfeit your chance to pass into "digital limbo", a space created by the computer gods to capture and upload mortal consciousnesses when they die and save them on a massive Shared Drive underneath a folder marked "Lost Souls". It is a kind of Elysian field for memories, but better than absolute annihilation. Murdering a computer or laptop with water ensures you will never come here.

If you visit a digital thing often, you should bookmark it. Bookmarking is a means of taming a digital spirit. It will learn, through perseverance and treats, to come at your call, to recognize your scent, and to protect you from other, more hostile digital ghosts.

Don't click on spam email. Don't click on emails from your friends with suspicious taglines. Maybe it is spam. Or maybe your friends have gone insane, and have all of a sudden decided that "You need to click on this deal" is their only way of communicating the horror of their everyday existence to you.

Shopping online? Wear a cross.

This has been the Guide to City Life module # 2.5 - "Digitization". We hope, but we do not expect. If you feel up to it, our next module is not very expensive, nor very time consuming, but will make you feel like you are improving yourself. Check it out: #32291, "City Gutters - What to Eat, What not to Eat."