Musings on the digital world
December 28, 2009
What would I have done in a pre-digital world? It seems like I would have amassed many more cabinets full of files, but my apartment would be no bigger. My mother can afford to be a pack rat because she lives in a big house in the suburbs, but I would have had to let go of all but the most necessary files, which would still have taken up a lot of space. Maybe we would rent another storage space. All of which makes me wonder: why do I have so much paper? I guess moving around a lot creates some of it–if I had had one set of doctors for the past ten years, I wouldn’t have to keep copies of all my records. And of course the ease of getting credit has allowed me to have a bunch of credit cards, all of whose records I have kept. But a large portion of my files are from schoolwork. I have kept them so diligently, because I know I won’t remember what’s in them, and I imagine I could use them in future writing, teaching, or librarianship. I imagine I would have kept all of that stuff even if I had gone to graduate school in the 1950s rather than the 2000s. Scholars tend to have lots of books and papers. Perhaps all of this digitization really is a blessing for scholars like me, in that it allows us to live without the mounds of papers we once would have had.
