Computers, Media and Music
How Computers Handle Media and Perform data destruction
There is one device that handles data in the most efficient manner. It's called a computer. Since its invention, mainframes, personal computers, and now, laptops have stored data and manipulated them like experts. As such, these electronic workhorses process data like no other machine can on the planet.
Data Creation and Data Destruction Unmasked
Computers do the job they do best because of their digital nature, and one that can be summarized in terms of bits and bytes consisting of nothing but ones and zeroes. For example, when you type the letter A on your computer, the device doesn't really know the letter you're typing. As far as the PC is concerned, that letter is 01000001.
Unknown to many, computers don't really multitask. They just do the tasks you throw at them so efficiently so it looks and feels like they're efficient multitaskers. For example, every data is stored in a retrievable location called a pointer.
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How Computers Stack Up Against the Human Brain
Comparatively, the human brain is less efficient, although it's a lot more complex with billions of neural connections. That's why we forget things. Unlike computers, we cannot just recover every memory on the fly. Worse, we tend to keep painful memories hidden in an area that psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud referred to as the subconscious.
To accomplish its tasks, there are three finite locations where the computer stores data: volatile memory or RAM, the hard drive, and digital media such as USB, disc drive or DVD drive. Hence, when you're looking for one specific photograph that you took two summers ago, it's relatively easier to find it.
And because everything is digitized or in binary format, every data can be sorted and manipulated in many different ways. In the Carl Sagan movie, Contact, a more advanced alien civilization manages to find humanity because of the digital age. The premise of the flick is that by reducing everything into a series of switches that are either turned on or off, knowledge becomes universal.
How PCs Upstage Music as the Universal Language
As the common saying goes, music is a universal language. This means that when a certain musical composition is played, virtually everybody can sense happiness, sadness and other emotions. Computers, however, have managed to once again up the ante by facilitating the most wide-ranging proliferation of CDs and DVDs available in the market.
The Social Cost of Over-Efficiency
Downloading, burning and ripping music, images and videos are the order of the day and unstoppable at that. And with this over-efficiency comes the urgent need to always recycle what we create through the help of the computer age. Luckily, the present technology makes this mission easy to accomplish.
Practising Safe and Responsible Data Usage
Data destruction can be achieved on the fly by making it a personal choice to use only burnable as well as reburnable CDs and other media. This way, there will be less waste as well as remorse about how we as humans are preparing for the future. Luckily, computers not only store, sort and use data to solve problems. They also help facilitate data destruction in a big way since it's only one mouse click or a finger tap away.