The real world is made up of everything, and computers can only process data. To put it more bluntly, all computers can process are numbers. Therefore, when we use computers to assist in daily things, the first thing to do is to digitize.

Although in practice, digitized data usually stored on computer storage devices are in binary form. But strictly speaking, any process of converting analog sources into any type of digital format can be called digitization.

Digitization refers to the process of converting information into digital format. Specifically, it is to convert an object, image, sound, text or signal into a series of numbers:

Once upon a time, more than 20 years ago, the term "digitalization" was like "cloud" in previous years. "Computing" and "big data", like "artificial intelligence" in the past two years, are hot words in the media.

At that time, there was no concept of self-media, but "digitization" was overwhelming, covering all media forms from books, journals, newspapers to radio and television.

In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, professor and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, published a book known as the bible of information technology in the twentieth century: "Being Digital", in Translated as "Digital Survival".

With digitalization as the main line, the book explains the changes that information technology will bring to future life, work, and education. It is a very prophetic book.

In the late 1990s, which was known as the "fire-stealing" era of China's Internet, this book caused huge waves in China.

A famous saying in the book - "The best way to predict the future is to create the future" - influenced a generation of people, including those who later rose to prominence in China's Internet upstarts.

More than twenty years have passed, and many of Negroponte's predictions in his book have become reality, especially the popularization of computers and the Internet. Computers, which were once expensive consumer goods in the home, have become items that everyone carries around (smartphones), and "digital survival" has really changed from a concept to a way of life.

Digitizing things is the basis for making them processable by computers.

Today, computer layering technology has solved the problem of separating the actual form of stored information from the form of displayed information. Although the information actually stored in the electrical components of the computer is binary 01 code, as computer operators, what we see and hear through the computer output device, and what is transmitted to the computer through the input device, is still daily text, pictures Image, audio and video, etc.

For the information stored in the computer, we call it data, instead of using the word "digits". Therefore, the digitization of things can actually be called “digitization”.