Where is your computer? Under the desk. Where is your monitor? On top. Where is the web page you are reading right now? ...... With digital technology, objects are no longer limited by their physical being. * The page you look at it is on your computer, in the hard drive and/or RAM, and it is also on the web, and also in many other computers. My blog is by no means popular, but what about a video on Youtube? I bet a popular video exists in millions of places at the same time.
So? Well, with the ability to have concurrent existence, we can now get around some of our biggest organizational barriers. Objects no longer need to occupy a single place and time. They can exist in multiple, by using third-order organization. A single object, even physical ones like a photo from the Bettmann Archive, can be cataloged by many many different criteria. Humans like to organize, to place things in order, and to create systems that employ this order.
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Clean your room.
The request is probably made constantly, worldwide, by parents of their children. I imagine that being a boy, I heard it more often, but really, my sisters were just as bad at keeping things organized. Why? Because it was our room and we knew were everything was. When I was a kid, I had the ability to immediately locate and retrieve anything I owned. I took pride in my possessions and while they were few, the request to clean my room always seemed silly.
Today, I really do need to clean my room. I spend almost no time keeping anything organized, but my room is the exception. It is a matter of neccesity, because while I have amazing search tools for all my digital media (regardless of properly ordered information) and don't mind going through it if I need to, a clean room is important in my daily routing. Well, my morning routine. If I wake up late and need to run, I can't spend 10 minutes looking for my wallet.
It might be silly, but even then, like I said, I really do need to clean my room.
*Technically, we are still limited by physical being. The point is minor, but computer data is not aphysical (totally made up that word). It is bits and bytes and those take physical space. Ignoring the system needed to use them, it is still a mistake to assume that we can have infinite data in finite space. Granted, it's tiny, so I wouldn't worry about your hard drive getting, you know, heavier.
The multi-locality of digital information is still a little amazing sometimes. How many people might be looking at the exact page that you are at any given moment? Where around the globe are they? And yet despite this many businesses are determined to maintain the old way of doing things (though not without reason $). An online movie rental comes pre-coded to self delete after the rental ends. An e-book that is “lent” to a friend will be unavailable to you during that time, despite the complete lack of physical requirement for this. Of course some people might want to consider sort of problem too. How many people might see that unfortunate picture that you’ve decided you didn’t really want to loose into the wide web? How many people may have already linked people to it?
ReplyDeleteHeh. I was always being told to clean my room when I was little, more so than my brother who was actually fairly neat and orderly. I find that I’m somewhat better at it these days, a lost bill or wallet is a far better incentive than simply having to deal with stuffed animal debris. Still though, the flat spaces seem to breed clutter.
Wouldn't it be sweet to google where that favorite shirt is. Hey you can now find you iphone with an app if you lose it!.... one day....i commented on the last blog about doing inventory in a store with the click of a button. Like putting some sticky thing on the shirts in a store and pressing a button to do inventory. Wouldn't that be sweet! It would be like locating anything in any space and time within that location... kind of like the internet. Isn't that what happens when we lose things? Maybe we can't find that page we wanted to show a friend or that utube video. So we google it. Well things around us are kind of the same way, only we view them as things more solid because we can tangibly hold them.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of homeless data was one of the foundational ideas that went into forming a network that was called "Freenet" - the data doesn't really exist completely anywhere but is distributed through millions of computers at once.
ReplyDelete... At least that was the theory. It turns out that the whole network was very high latency, poorly put together, and its inherent anonymity attracted extremely unsavory and illegal activity.
Still, the idea was reborn in the concept of "the cloud" - that vast network of distributed repositories of data in which we are to entrust our data for now and eternity. Let's hope it works better this time around.
you make a good point that digital places can be in multiple locations, without us even knowing where or how many places they are in. Therefore there may be more than one place to find something. Unfortunately with physical objects life isn't as easy. If only I had all the time in the world to keep a list of where everything I own is, but lets be honest, I don't.
ReplyDeleteon and by the way....I really need to clean my room too hah.
Objects are no longer limited to their physical being..I believe with the advancement of technology, that our current 'physical beings' will all eventually be digitized into the virtual place of the World Wide Web. We are beginning to see more and more physical objects be replaced by virtual representations that are as good. Along with your concept of a 'clean room', this eventual digitization will clean out offices, homes, and schools of all the hardware clutter.
ReplyDeleteNice post overall. You did a good job summarizing Weinberger’s overall point. Next time just work on adding a few specifics about the reading itself, be it direct quotes or, perhaps just by using some of the terms he uses (first, second, and third orders of order, for example). You’ve got the gist here, you just need a few more direct nods to the reading itself.
ReplyDelete