Concerning Creativity, Influence, Ownership, etc. with Digital Media: The Many Rooted Tree

As stated by Professor Bob King in his audio presentation, Analogue media is continuous- the signal it produces is a single unit.
Digital media is discontinuous- the signal it produces is made of several units weaved together.
This is the case for all mediums digital or analogue- a film strip is a single item, where as a digital video file is composed of many many many small bits grouped together to form many images.
In a way, the technical nature of either medium reflects its respective nature on a symbolic level too. As Lev Manovich says in “What is New Media,” the digital format began as a means of computing, a way to perform functions of mathematics more efficiently. Although computers and their children have moved on to more than just mathematics, it could be argued that digital media is still inherently a format of mathematics, turning all it contains from Beethoven’s 5th to a productivity report into mathematical equations.
Even Digital Media itself can become a small part of a larger whole- Steve Dixon documents several cases of performance art and choreography using digital media as a means of enhancing choreography and performance art and other such live human arts, such as the performance artist who grafted computer parts onto his body for a rather literal example.
Yet another layer of similarity comes into play with the notion of influence- digital media is characterized by remixes, reimaginings, reboots and the like, some- like “youtube poops,” as creatively bankrupt as the economy of Michael Bay’s brain, others improving upon and enriching their source material (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP7QC_C1rkE). References, stock footage and audio, influences, and other elements bled together to form new media in much the same way as the zeros and ones of the digital form itself. As noted by Lawrence Lessig, this has a huge impact on copy right, with no form of art able to be completely protected from parody, remix, and various forms of review.
Lev Manovich further expounds upon the mathematical nature of digital media in “Principles of New Media,” in which he discusses the medium’s “modular,” “or “fractal,” nature as a medium of many small independent pieces forming a whole.
Girl Talk is perhaps the great culmination of the notion of all things digital being composed of many parts working together to form complete signals, in this case sounds, in that all of his music is composed of bits and pieces taken from numerous songs from various genres. From the fractal nature to the creative fluidity, Girl Talk, for better or worse, is perhaps the Zeitgeist of the digital age.
This mixed up multi-part nature is likely the source of the supposed aesthetic inferiority of digital media as opposed to analogue, i.e., why film snobs resist the movement towards digital film, why music snobs listen to vinyl, etc. speaking from personal taste and experience, I can say that I do find analogue mediums to be superior in almost all cases in terms of quality, but I find these differences are often too subtle to really warrant the inconvenience of most analogue devices compared to their digital counterparts- besides, it’s the content on the media that’s supposed to be important.
As for creativity, influence, ownership, etc., we can glean the following from these musings: digital media, far more so than analogue, encourages wild creativity, offering convenience and freedom unparalleled by anything possible in the analogue age, but discourages ownership, making media open not only to be viewed by anyone, but used by anyone. Therefore, in a final assessment, Digital Media is Fractal, both on a technical level of one's and zero's, and on a philosophical artistic level as a medium characterized more by mixing and mashing than by individual originality, for better or worse.