I would agree with the core part of what you're saying. There is a difference between the physical medium information is stored in, and the pattern of the medium that is storing the information.<p>To make this difference clearer, look at a typical cd or dvd. An equivalent article would talk about which chemicals and combination of lasers at certain optical frequencies are used to etch patterns into the surface of the cd/dvd.<p>An article on <i>encoding</i> would detail how the pattern of microscopic bumps on a cd/dvd represents binary data formats.