Home – Home – Jornals – Professional Education in the Modern World 2019 number 3

In this article the author traces the history of the term "digit" and its derivatives ("digital") from the original to the modern meaning and the process of changing its content. He comes to the conclusion that currently “digital technologies” refers to information technology, as well as industrial technology controlled by computer systems operating on the basis of the binary number system. The author makes a brief excursion into the history of positional number systems and emphasizes that the binary system was not the most popular in the past, but it was known, and a number of major thinkers foresaw its relevance in the future. The author states that digital devices are resistant to interference, and their advantages are in signal processing. At the same time, the meaning (content) has always belonged of the actors of communication. The author notes that, as is often the case, the term "digit" ("digital")has undergone metonymic transformation: being a representative of the class (science-intensive technologies), it started to mean the whole class. In addition, it began to denote qualitative novelty - not only technical, but also social. But in contrast to the "classical" metonymy, in which the rhetorical character and figurative meaning are perceived, in most "digital" cases there is no reflection. As a result, largely for career and/or opportunistic reasons, the term begins to denote something that actually cannot denote, for the technical characteristics of the economy and production do not make them qualitatively different. Thus, we obviously have a typical case: a signifier without a significate, that is, the simulacrum.