The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff (The MIT Press)

Granular Certainty, the Vertical Filing Cabinet, and the Transformation of Files

Craig Robertson

Anthropomorphizing paper acknowledges the anxiety associated with misplacing loose paper. Circulating through the office, papers were expected to manifest the valuable attributes of information as a discrete unit but not to become disconnected from the ov... See more

People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you'd think we'd have learned that lesson by now.