No matter what you do as a profession, and no matter how you interact with your social sphere, there are going to be bridges and transformations between digital and analog data. Most of these probably occur without you thinking about it, but it can be interesting and illuminating to go back every once in a while and see where some of these translations happen.

For a few examples, you can think about digital acquisitions, the bitcoin phenomenon, why knowledge transfer is essential, and how big data and the cloud may be affecting your life. These are just four examples of many thousands of points of intrigue all within the average span of your daily activities.

Digital Acquisitions

In the business world, you can look at digital transformation as an example. Say that a business has physical archives of client lists, past products, and logs of dates and manuals. If this business is going to be acquired, all of those archives have to be transferred to a new system. And that’s where utilizing digital technology to work through the acquisition process is so useful. If all of that physical information turns into virtual data, suddenly there’s a much more searchable database of historical value to peruse.

The Bitcoin Phenomenon

Doing some research into bitcoin can lead to some interesting meditations as well. Money, initially, was an analog idea. You have to have some physical object to pay for something. Initially, it may have been gold or silver or some other precious metal. Then it turned into cash. And then credit cards or other virtual transfers were indicators of that physical object. But now, bitcoin is entirely digital and virtual. It is created out of digital energy sources and has no physical backing. Talk about a curious equation!

Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfer will often lead you to transformations between digital and analog worlds as well. As people come to retirement age in their companies, they may have specialized knowledge about certain topics. If they retire before they transfer that knowledge, then that expertise is essentially lost. That’s why utilizing digital transfer to work through knowledge transfer becomes a vital component of keeping a business afloat after having specialized work.

Big Data and the Cloud

And then you can consider big data and its relationship with the cloud. Even though virtual data has been stored in a digital format for many years, adding the cloud to the mix puts another wrinkle in it. Because now, all of that data is stored as a matter of small pieces of this gigantic net of information, and all of it has backups everywhere. So you could argue that the cloud is a virtual entity and that it’s backing up all of the analog information that you have that was originally converted to digital data!