As a self-diagnosed typomaniac, I possess an affliction most graphic designers identify with: I am addicted to type. This affliction started at a young age as compulsive reading of children’s books, later it moved into compulsive collecting. I’ve amassed comic books, magazines, journals, and literature over the years, just to name a few. Later I would digitize some news articles and even blog writings as PDFs because who knows when those items will disappear from the net. It’s all been quite manageable until I started collecting bookmarks, and that’s when things went awry.
Having grown up with television, I was accustomed to watching something until it was finished. I assumed that as long as the book was there I should read it to the end. The idea of setting the book aside uncompleted just didn’t occur to me. This somewhat obsessive approach to reading manifested itself again during the summer after third grade.
When I read about Chris Van Allsburg, who wrote The Polar Express, admitting his own obsessive reading habits in these excerpts from his 1986 Caldecott Medal acceptance speech, I was relieved to find a like mind. Van Allsburg continues:
As years have passed, my taste in literature has changed. I do, however, still have obsessive reading habits. I pore over every word on the cereal box at breakfast, often more than once. You can ask me anything about shredded wheat. I also spend more time in the bathroom than necessary, determined to keep up with my New Yorker subscription.
Not everyone has this level of dedication, but I identified with Van Allsburg’s bathroom habit since that is one of the only places I can escape for a moment of silence to read. Before you jump at me with bathroom humor, understand that I have a one-year-old son who requires full-time attention. When I want to read it has to happen behind closed doors or after 8 p.m. when he’s asleep. I work hard to prevent these titles from piling up by reading them the moment I get them or soon thereafter at breakfast, lunch, dinner, or late nights. Not only do I digest the magazines, but I also read my students’ writing assignments, plus any academic books to help me prepare lectures, and finally a novel here or there. Print is the most tangible typographic experience I can have. I consume every single page: advertisements, headlines, mastheads, articles, indexes, contents, and folios. Once I get past typographic adoration and consumption, I will use a combination of fast-reading techniques by scanning, key word spotting, or skimming. After I browse through an article I will decide if it’s worth going back to critically read. After reading them, I will file them away in my archive.
I’ve tracked this habit back to my adolescence when I collected comic books, only now I collect nearly anything. Around 1999, I began to do this digitally by finding the articles I wanted to keep at the magazine’s website and then generating PDFs or full html copies (I have nearly 300mb of data stored and won’t run out of space anytime soon with 111.9GB left on my hard disk). While I would do this with articles only found online, I began to archive some of my print articles by tracking them down and making PDFs. From an archiving standpoint, this digital library saves me space, and when I acquired my Palm Pilot in 2002 it allowed me portability. I could place these documents on it and read on the go with a portable pull file. The entire process seems eerily similar to ripping audio CDs and then placing them in an iPod.
With mobile phones, PDAs, and Blackberry devices, portability reigns supreme, but it is an unusual way to consume information because of the tiny display sizes. I’ve grown tired of the dim screen and small type size with reading on my Palm, and when I was introduced to del.icio.us I felt a sigh of relief. When I’m on the run shuffling between my studio, office, or classroom, del.icio.us lets me save articles so I can access them from any computer on the campus where I teach. Not only can I save them, but I can also see if other users have saved related material, and also measure how popular they are. I use neither the networking nor popularity feature, but I do save the articles and then read most of them. I say most because at 753 bookmarks and counting, I can’t recall which I’ve read and which I’ve just saved for the sake of saving. Surely, people out there must have ten times my count from all the ‘research’ they do in order to be the water-cooler-know-it-all. A former manager of mine was renowned for getting his morning coffee in our office kitchen, eavesdropping on what we talked about, and then returning over lunch to have ‘found out more on the net.’ He probably has nearly 7,490 items in del.icio.us from all he studied up on.
Today, it’s not enough that I get piles of magazines in the mail along with all of my other print media, will then proceed to save them via del.iocio.us, but I also contend with links I get via email, the television, or magazines themselves. Content gets pushed at me daily. Some of it looks ‘interesting’, so I save it. God, I hate that word, interesting. It’s so loose and vague, but when I find something that peaks my interest and looks ‘interesting’, I’ll tag it in del.icio.us, as if ‘he with the most links wins.’ Typically, one worries about space when collecting volumes of books, but that’s not the case with stored URLs because they have a small footprint: they point to content elsewhere. This handy del.icio.us tool has become hard to handle. Now the problem is I don’t need to worry about storage, so I may as well collect all the links I can. The number of links grows daily, making it truly impossible to remember what I have and why I saved it. If I had 700 volumes of books and/or magazines, I would have a library, but with del.icio.us I have information anxiety.
An argument could be made that del.icio.us represents a virtual space with no metaphoric connection to the shelving and filing system in my office. It’s not visually associative the way that color, position, and categorization help me find books on shelves or in filing cabinets. Nor does it have any connection to the folder, icon, and viewing metaphors that my Apple Finder delivers. It’s all text. Goddamn this Web 2.0 business. I want my taxonomy back, to hell with this folksonomy bologna. Great, a folksonomy innovation like del.icio.us is great for sharing links amongst users, but why do my actions now mimic that of web browsers themselves?
I have been archiving the archive to the point of losing focus. I bet this is what Gordon Bell feels like. As a 72-year-old computer scientist with Microsoft, Gordon records everything. Everything. MyLifeBits is an experiment in lifetime storage. Everything he comes in contact with goes onto a hard disc. Creating massive storage archives in your hard disc or tagging bookmarks endlessly through del.icio.us may cut down on the amount of space you need and allow you to save items for later. But it’s more like save them for never. Is this the future?
My compulsion to read print from start to finish has not changed, and I could care less about archiving everything, and I especially don’t care about some of my bookmarks. Honestly, when will I take time out of my day to learn about paper making techniques? So there’s a blogger who wrote about the gentle art of saying no, will I really use that at the office? Bookmarking has gotten out of hand because I don’t always read the articles completely, moreover, I have created too much to read and keep track of. Unlike my office library, I don’t have to worry about running out of space with del.icio.us. In the end, I feel like it all comes down to crap. Like junk television and junk foods, there are junk bookmarks in my collection. My physical, digital, and virtual library has become unmanageable during a time when I feel like less is certainly more.
Suggested reading from my archive:
Living the
Simple Life by Elaine St. James: scale back to enjoy more
Technopoly by Neil Postman: how technology allows for more doing and undoing
Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte: debunking all of the digital hype
Future Shock by Alvin Toffler: forecasted the technology tsunami overloading us
ME TOO!! I once had to re-type an entire manual for a product used to remove odor from pig manure (this was before OCR) and I'm sorry to admit I didn't mind because I started to find the material interesting. And, though I loathe watching sports on TV, I will read Sports Illustrated cover to cover.
I haven't started using del.icio.us yet though.... actually, I kind of lost interest halfway down the article, into the del.icio.us stuff, but I had to finish anyway :) And what's worse, with less time to read these days, I'm starting to get a build-up of books that I own but have not yet read... that used to be simply non-existent. God, I must be getting old...
On May.04.2007 at 01:31 PM