Gregory Lee

Zhang (2018) notes that “by 1976, 85% of all film cameras and 90% of all film sold in the US was Kodak”.

general, digital cameras were a massive revolution for photography. Being digital, the technology and its use was able to spread exponentially. Notably, digitalization allowed customers to take exponentially more photographs than with film, which was expensive both to buy and to have developed. Film, therefore, could grow at best linearly.

Later, cellphones began to include cameras as an added feature, meaning that almost everyone began to acquire photography capabilities without the need to own a dedicated camera. Unless they partnered with cellphone manufacturers, this was bad news for camera manufacturers as their product had essentially disappeared (dematerialized) as a stand-alone device in many if not most households.

Technological disruption, particularly through digitalization, has become perhaps the world’s most pervasive long-term force for change.

The digital world essentially refers to something built out of binary code, which forms data and programming code

Digital things inherently have no tangible form, being composed of numbers and comprising only digital information.

Digital for physical substitution: Physical things can be replaced by digital things.

Digital for analogue substitution: Consider, also, the substitution of digital for analogue information.

This process of converting analogue information and/or physical things into digital form is termed digitization.

Digitization never entirely eliminates physical elements: The physical world and physical things remain relevant. All information, whether analogue or digital, is created, transmitted, received, and stored in physical objects or by physical mechanisms.