What is digital?

As a proud and self proclaimed geek, I often get asked about digital this and digital that.

"What's the digital strategy?" "What should we do with digital?"

What is digital?

It seems to have become the de facto term for online. With an occasional nod to mobile phones.

Or maybe video games.

To me this is a symptom of the not thinking cleary - of our need as an industry to maintain the delineations we have structurally established.

The picture is of a digital cross track projector. Viacom are setting them up in flagship stations on the London Underground over the next year or so - my mate Steve kindly showed me this fully functioning prototype. Already there are questions surrounding what they are a medium - are they a poster? An out of home film without sound? Will traditional creative agencies produce the films? Or digital agencies?

What about digital television? What about when it becomes proper IPTV all pumping through a Media Centre or Set-Top-Box equivalent?

What about digital radio? Or newspapers that are delivered electronically onto electronic paper?

Sorry. That's a lot of (mostly rhetorical) questions. You get my point.

To me the Internet was never a just new medium - it was a new kind of medium that had the ability to deliver the content developed for any other channel and was interactive to boot.

And the internet changed the rules of the game. People aren't willing to accept interruption online like they are elsewhere. Digital consumers born into an internet age don't think and act like the passive massive.

So what happens when all channels become digital?