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Digitally Thin

Curve-billed Thrasher, Alamogordo NM, November 12, 2011

"There’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It's a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work."

Digitally Thin

There’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It's a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things we’re creating feel in our minds. Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time.

Perceptually, beyond some low threshold, data becomes boundless to us. Cloud storage compounds this: we don't even worry about HDs filling up anymore! Even when digital streams have clear beginnings and ends, I think we — humans — do a bad job at keeping those edges in view. In trying to reflect upon vast experiences or datasets captured entirely in bits with most standard interfaces, we run into the same wall as in trying to imagine infinity: we can’t.

Source: The Digital-Physical, On building Flipboard for iPhone & finding the edges of our digital narratives by Craig Mod, March 2012

clipped March 30, 2012

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