The anti-logic of excess
I noticed an interesting side effect of the iPod’s mass storage tonight: I pay far less attention to each album than I used to. I was wandering through my CD shelves when I realized how many great albums I have that I never listen to. I either shuffle past them, listen to my algorithmically perfect playlists, or obsessively listen to my newest purchases. The real-life metaphors like cover flow are a shitty mirror of the real world, and I don’t find them as inspiring as browsing the real thing.
Storage on my PC has bloated in the same way. I have more than a terabyte now with more than 5 years of digital photos, 15 years of source code, and hundreds of other projects. Sometimes it’s just too much damned stuff. Not only is there too much stuff, the ways to browse it all really suck.
Maybe it’s just a matter of despising accumulation, or perhaps I need to learn to browse the stuff better, but I wonder if storing it all digitally devalues the quality of all of it all. What happens when our DVD collections fit on our iPods? And all of our books? I don’t doubt that it happens, but browsing it all will be a very different experience than what we have now.
Not that browsing in the real world is perfect either. Where is that damned CD, did I lend it out? It’s got to be here somewhere … Things get lost, or they end up out of order, or the shear size of the stuff makes it impossible to traverse. And relating physical objects is difficult, so learning more about each thing requires real work.
But somewhere between losing the identity of the individual things and gaining the ability to relate them better, there has to be a better way. I’ll miss my shelves of CDs and books, where i can quietly browse and appreciate each work. On the other hand, I’d love the ability to jump to Wikipedia from my CD shelf, but I can’t easily do that yet from my iPod (and I’m pretty sure Apple doesn’t wants me to).1 Will software ever solve the problem well?
- Because Apple wants me to go to their store ↩