There’s been a lot of talk in gaming, movie, and music circles about the growing popularity of “digital downloads,” and whether they’ll replace disc-based media in the future.

All of that stuff is irrelevant to today’s complaint. What bugs me is the actual term “digital downloads.” Why? Because it’s unnecessarily redundant. All downloads are digital! There’s no such thing as an “analog download.” Downloading itself is the very act of receiving a series of zeroes and ones from a remote server. You can download a file via an analog transmission medium, but that has nothing to do with the file itself.

What’s next? Video movies? Picture photographs? Sound music?