Editing 1683: Digital Data

{{comic
| number    = 1683
| date      = May 20, 2016
| title     = Digital Data
| image     = digital_data.png
| titletext = Ã¢â¬ÅIf you can read this, congratulationsÃ¢â¬âthe archive youÃ¢â¬â¢re you're using still knows about the mouseover textÃ¢â¬Â!
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Initial draft.}}
Digital information, strictly speaking, does not degrade. While physical media themselves (such as books, or hard drives) may degrade as the universe continues, information, by itself, does not decay over time, and can be copied indefinitely with no changes. [This could be phrased much better.]

However, in this comic, Randall points out that while information itself doesn't degrade, things that are on the internet are often degraded through copying, because the copy is not 1:1. As the frames continue, they gain the appearance of images which have been screenshotted repeatedly, with a resulting loss of quality due to compression of the original resolution and jpeg artifacting. In the last frame, this is taken to an extreme, as the frame appears to have been very sloppily screenshotted off of a smartphone or two, and covered in watermarks from various websites and programs.

[9Gag is well known, maybe also provide the example of iFunny. Talk about things like "unregistered HyperCam" and the phenomenon in more detail.]
[You can also see the word tumblr in the last panel. Additionally, the phone frame on the top of panel 4 would not have come from the same device as the bottom of panel 3.]

The title text contains seemingly garbage characters, which result from encoding special characters (such as "smart" quotation marks) into a different character set (probably encoded as utf-8 and decoded as iso-8859-1).

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript}}

[Cueball and a White Hat are walking.]

Cueball: The great thing about digital data is that it never degrades.

[The next panel is slightly pixelated]

Cueball: Hard drives fail, of course, but their bits can be copied forever without loss.

[The third panel is more pixelated, the white is slightly discolored, and it contains part of the interface of some program]

Cueball: Film degrades, paint cracks, but a copy of a century-old data file is identical to the original.

[The fourth panel is even more pixelated and discolored, and contains watermarks and more 'frame' elements]

Cueball: If humanity has a permanent record, we are the first generation in it.

White Hat: Amazing.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Self-reference]]