1. Digital, the new medium for text

1.1 Digitized text

To fully understand the material underpinnings of the current revolution, we first need to look at digitization techniques. Computers make it possible to encode images, sound and text and process them programmatically. The convergence of different media brought about by their digitization constitutes what is now known as multimedia. In this process, however, text occupies a singular place. Unlike images and sound, whose analog materiality is coded, text can be coded in two fundamentally different ways: image mode and text mode.