Get offline, fondle some paper

by Sapphire (June 21, 2005)

I finally got my all-digital lifestyle dream to come true about 6 months ago. My office contained paper solely for the purpose of jotting stuff down quickly. Everything was on the computer - my entire life. I think my soul was actually stored on a partition of my hard drive.

Took me two years to get it together, and the whole time, I felt like my life was slimming, losing unwanted pounds, becoming more radiant and beautiful. I could now sing “I’m Too Sexy” with feeling.

I was wrong. It is just not humanly possible. Nay… it is unnatural.

It seemed like such a great idea. No more leafing through pages for hours, looking for that hastily scribbled phone number I remember taking down while driving 6 years ago. It’s all on the computer now in searchable format! Nothing ever lost again, right?

The operative words here are “searchable format”. Searchable according to a computer. According to how a computer “thinks”. A computer that doesn’t always grasp that “File” and “file” are the same word. Oy!

I can find the bloody stuff faster by leafing through reams of paper than by searching on my hard drive through a carefully arranged database. Human brains simply don’t think in search terms, so half the time I can’t even think of a search term that’ll narrow it down significantly, and that means “leafing” through hundreds of computer pages by opening each of them up separately in whatever application they belong to and then looking through for whatever it was I wanted to find.

Computer files force you to rely on memory alone, but reject half the relevant memory. You can’t tell the computer “It was on yellow legal paper, with a corner torn off, and it had the pre-amble to the Constitution typed at the top, but what I’m looking for is the phone number for Bob’s Pizzeria that I wrote diagnally at the bottom in green ink.” A description that specific is a goldmine to a human being, but give it to a piece of spinning hardware and the thing just blinks its cursor at you. That page is buried with every other page of every description imaginable behind uniform file names, all stacked in a little GUI box.

Pages (what we used to call “hard copies”, for any of you under 25) engage 2, sometimes 3 of your senses, as well as your memory. That visual image provides any number of clues, some of which can be easily spotted by leafing. Sometimes I even remember what the page felt like - crinkly, soft, crackly, thick, thin, rough, smooth - and I can leaf by feeling alone. Once or twice, I’ve even known I was close because the scent of the pages changes. Okay, so that one’s pretty rare, but it’s one more thing that’s definitely never gonna happen with a computer.

So I bought some notebooks and some 3-hole paper and some index tabs, and I’m going to build myself a little physical, leafable archive of stuff. It’ll never be the ridiculous collection of clutter I had years ago - thank heaven I learned that from this experience. But there are some things worth printing off and writing by hand.

And here’s the kicker: I have also noticed in the past couple of years that I am getting stupid. So is every person I know who’s heavily into the digital revolution. We’re all having trouble accessing even familiar words as we speak and write. We’re all noticing various signs of our brains getting sluggish and overly linear - like computer programs. I really believe this is because we’re re-training our brains to think like search engines, and search engines are wildly inferior to the human mind.

While I’m mostly writing this as some friendly thoughts from one webmaster to another, I’m also considering that my visitors are living in the same digital revolution as I am. I predict that in a few years, people are going to start turning off their cell phones part-time, they’re going to pursue offline hobbies, and they’re going to realize we’re not ready to download our consciousnesses into glowing boxes just yet.

When and if that little mini-revolution comes, the smart marketer is going to tie their sites into offline activities, so they can remain an integral part of visitors’ lives. Another little prediction from me? By the time this mini-revolution comes to pass, the brick and mortar stores will have made a gigantic mistake, and gotten rid of half their stores to save on paying wages. I’m not kidding - the signs are already there. More and more stores are stocking their stores less and less, closing locations and understaffing. And when you ask why the hell there’s no notebook paper in the notebook paper aisle, they tell you it’s all online now.

As soon as they get there, they’re going to be scrambling to get back off.

Don’t get me wrong: the net is here to stay, and it’s wonderful, and it will always have value to people. But it hasn’t yet settled into its role in the market. Businesses are careening from one extreme to the other, and smart money says the net will be integral, but not the be-all-end-all.

Posted in The BS Files
Subscribe to the feed or email updates