I’ve noticed another fundamental change over the years that they don’t really mention there. This might not be the main problem the younger generation has yet, but one they’re avoiding.
Drives used to be very limited, as were the files we dealt with; we just didn’t have that much stuff on them. A relatively small, single hierarchy that conceptually fits in your brain could handle it. And it was natural to do that and think that way.
But now we have several TB of drive space, and those drives are bigger and cheaper every year, so you just add more whenever you need. And modern bloated software creates tons of files. I have ~2 million files on my desktop PC across countless directories on 4 drives. (And some of those files are entire virtual machines or virtual hard drives full of their own files.) You start to run into the limitations of hierarchy real quick.
By that I mean, if I have an e-book about writing, will it be in my ‘Documents\Writing’ directory, my ‘Downloads\E-Books’ directory, or ‘Media\E-Books’, or ‘Users\Daaksyde\My Documents\To Read’? (That’s a very simple example, of course - don’t ask about how scattered art/graphics/pictures/images in ‘organized’ directories).
Over the years I’ve tried several different organizational structures - by filetype, by primary application that uses it, by subject, by use (project, records, etc.) It is unwieldy no matter what structure I come up with. Shortcuts/symlinks clutter it up more as much as they help.
It’s still useful, but not nearly as natural and effective as it used to be and many think it still is. I wonder what the younger generation will come up with for a future approach (other than throw it all in one pile and search).
I use devonthink to organize my digital detritus. If I’m really organized about it, I write a markdown document with clickable links to the files in question.
(I’ve downloaded entire runs of periodicals from europeana as pdfs Using a few simple commands, I can search the fultext of 20-30 years of those magazines).
I file my (um) files in folders, by my internal job numbers, separated by year. But, when I need to go find something, it’s all just a search. My mac can do full text searches on many file types faster than I could manually navigate to the folder. But, the idea of just putting everything in the same folder just doesn’t sit right, and I never really did old fashioned paper filing, beyond using a card catalog at the library.
Since MSDOS and Windows 3.1 I have always copied my entire Documents folder from one computer to the next. There’s always changes but the structure is always pretty much there. It gets added to and subtracted from but I usually have no problem finding things. Occasionally I have to search. The biggest problem is with the Pictures folders, as we have digital photos from 2005 when we got our first digital camera. It’s all there, organized by year and then by date. Alas we’ve never put keywords or anything, but my wife has done things like adding a folder, say, for “2010 Trip to England” or something.
Basically the structure’s there – but the number of subdirectories and files have increased over the years. And the number of backups.
But then we have a box of photos from pre-digital we need to go through. Not to mention inherited photos from the old days.
I must say, when I try to find things on my iPhone, or try to copy things from iPhone to PC (or vice versa), I go crazy. There’s no file structure at all that I can see. It’s all hidden. And I remember that from my first work with a Macintosh from 1985. This disconnect between the user and the workings of the computer is one major reason we decided to go the IBM PC route back in the 1980s.
I’m glad I got to see the personal computer evolve from the start.
I’ve started importing them into Calibre, deleting the original metadata, and adding my own. But it’s a lot of work, at best. After I’ve imported, it’s easier to export, and I can use the genre column to create folders, etc.
And since most books and articles are in pdf, I have to pre-process them, and note the pre-processing settings.
So it feels like we’re 3/4 of the way to living Fahrenheit 451.
We have the robot dogs, the “mosquitos” in our ears, and rampant anti-intellectualism, so all we need now are full wall screens and the robot dogs to get injectors full of poison. We don’t even have to burn stuff, just demonize it enough, and ignorance becomes more prized than knowledge (see MAGA).
