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Passion For Reason : Analog thinking in a digital world

Raul Pangalangan
Inquirer News Service

WHEN Presidential Spokesman Ignacio Bunye testified before Congress that he couldn't recognize President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's voice in the "Gloriagate" CD, he explained that what he heard was "a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy."

That argument would have worked for cassette tapes, but not for CDs. When it comes to digital records, the data do not "degenerate" with each recopying. In my layman's understanding, digital records are merely arrangements of 0's and 1's, and a copy is as good as the original so long as that binary sequence remains unchanged. I can imagine Bunye's defense. In the pre-MP3 world, the copy was AAD -- originally recorded in Analog, remastered in Analog (poorly, as Bunye would argue), and became Digital only in final form.

However, I must defend Bunye's analog thinking. It's simply a generational thing. Perhaps he recalled the last time he copied his 45 rpm record of Johnny Mathis onto a cassette and which, by the third recopy, started to sound like Diomedes Maturan (or vice-versa, if you are a true nationalist). When my son saw my dad's manual typewriter for the first time, he said: "Lolo's computer is really cool. When he types, it's already printing at the same time."

Indeed, I will confess to my own analog moments. Last year when I was loading up my music on my iPod, I was about to actually start typing by hand each song title in the iTunes list on my computer, good analog dinosaur that I am. Mercifully, my son took pity and clicked a few buttons, and to my delight, all the music information started cascading onto my screen like a flowing river from iPod heaven. But please understand that I belong to the last batch of lawyers who actually typed their court pleadings using a manual Underwood-and anyone who has typed anything in quadruplicate, using fragile "onion skins" and smudgy carbon paper, deserves a medal.

You can sniff out analog instincts everywhere. Secretaries who would rather retype a 20-page document, rather than search for it in their hard drive or use a scanner. Bosses whose e-mail messages look like formal letters because, not knowing how to use the computer, they dictate the message to someone who does. Teachers who make their students memorize lists and do other mind-numbing functions. People who actually read and highlight the manuals of their new software ("If it scrolls out of the screen, it's gone forever!"). Attorneys who always talk like they were conducting a direct examination of a witness, even in normal conversation (if that is at all possible with these types, God save the Republic!).

The analog world's last bastion is the law. We lawyers don't live in no Juristic Park for nuttin'. For instance, Filipino lawyers exalt the "separation of powers" among the legislative, executive and judicial branches as the epitome of legal wisdom. Yet Harvard constitutionalist Lawrence Tribe, a math whiz in his youth, has suggested that such mechanistic check-and-balance is a vestige of the Newtonian imagination. The separation of powers is the lawyers' version of what 18th century scientists knew: To prevent the government from abusing its power, you must design the constitution like "a machine that goes of itself," or in the words of The Federalist Papers, one that "would enable government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

By 1928, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes already put down our Court's mechanistic thinking. Reviewing Springer v. Philippine Islands, a decision by the Philippine Supreme Court on the election of corporate directors, he said: "The great ordinances of the Constitution do not establish ... fields of black and white ... with mathematical precision [nor] divide the branches into watertight compartments." Instead, law is "a penumbra shading gradually from one extreme to another."

Today 77 years later, Filipinos still talk as if law is so exact, precise and predictable just like a manual Underwood typewriter -- and ignore what Professor Tribe calls the "changing curvature of constitutional space."

Yesterday, at Bocobo Hall of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, the Internet and Society Program sponsored a forum on Gloriagate Blogging. Prof. JJ Disini, fresh with his LL.M. from the Harvard Law School, convened a very dynamic group of the top Filipino bloggers and discussed the power of this new medium.

I am, though not a blogger, wholly fascinated. Before blogging, all public speech was regulated by media hierarchies and corporate behemoths. With blogging, Holmes' "free marketplace of ideas" has finally begun to operate on a level playing field (though not entirely cost-free, as Disini pointed out, and still shackled in the "prison of words," as Manolo Quezon said in the forum).

We must stamp out the vestiges of analog thinking, in favor of the digital imagination. The analog values the logical, the sequential and the hierarchical. The digital exalts the intuitive, the spontaneous and the democratic. The Xerox and the Betamax paved the way to Edsa People Power I -- the iron fist of martial law would have censored all news of Ninoy Aquino's assassination. "Texters" [SMS senders] mobilized the mammoth crowds at Edsa II within hours of the vote on the second envelope of evidence against Joseph Estrada. Perhaps Edsa III (or IV) will be a blogger's revolution, when the thinking but unorganized Filipino will make his voice heard, without the mediation of government or civil society elites.