Intriguing Advogato essay by GaryM, sparked by David Gelernter’s NYT advertorial on the obsolescence of the file cabinet metaphor for organizing data.
“David Gelernter’s thinly disguised advertising piece Forget the Files and the Folders: Let Your Screen Reflect Life, for all it’s absurdities, is still something of a thread of a good idea in his “narrative file system” thesis: the idea of desktops, files and folders is a quaint retrieval from an office world very few of us remember and an organizational tool alien to the way people view their data.
No one organizes their home placing all items made by Scotts Tissue in one room, all Rubbermaid stuff in another, all Sony equipment on one shelf, Toshiba on another. We don’t even keep all audio tools in one room and leave all visual tools in another. How we actually use our data is determined by the stories and narratives we wish to experience and construct. It’s time we took the initiative to start building computing tools that recognize this.”
The article describes the problem nicely, doesn’t propose any useful solutions. Too bad.
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