Analog to digital: the Indexical Function of Photographic Images - Corey Dzenko (2009)

• McLuhan describes the impact of new media with the phrase "the medium is the message.”
• Digital photography "accelerates" or "enlarges" traditional photographic processes - allows for greater ease in editing than analog photography, because it transforms photographs from objects into data.
• Photographs are perceived to represent reality in their reference to a subject in time.
• The lack of physical connection between a digital photograph's subject and image suggests digital images function as pure iconicity.
• Viewers expect "photographs to embody transparency and objecthood”.
• Digital technology is a new format, or medium, for newspaper content but its layout follows conventions of print, allowing the new format to function similarly to the older format and thus, digital photographs function as printed images once did.