It should come as no surprise to any readers of these columns that I
have a problem with throwing things away. On the whole I've identified this
as a "personal" problem, something that's rather distinct to myself.
While it's true that quite a few of my friends have this same problem (though
of course to a more limited degree), many of them don't. All those who do, however,
are of my generation. And that, I suppose, is a sign. It seems that the feeling
that throwing something out is a crime, perhaps even a sin, is a distinctly
generational trait - a trait that simply doesn't shackle today's youth as it
does many of my contemporaries.
I encountered this perhaps rather unsurprising discovery, as is usually the
case, unexpectedly. I follow the Spotlight
reports of the Digital Media and Learning project of the MacArthur Foundation.
These reports, understandably, I suppose, deal with issues that interest me,
both personally and professionally. One recent report was by Kevin Denney, a
researcher from the Illinois Institute of Technology, who studies storage habits.
In his report he
tells us:
We’re especially interested in storage habits related to hobbies and collections. One of the more interesting and, at least to me, previously unknown phenomenon amongst younger children is their predilection to dispose of what they’ve created.
I'm not easily shocked, but I have to admit that reading
this was rather disturbing to me. For some reason I'd assumed that children
are hoarders, and that if anything, this behavior
eases up as we age. But even if they aren't hoarders, the thought that they
might nonchalantly cast something away, something that they've
created themselves, is hard for me to grasp. Perhaps Marc Prensky has been right
all along, and the brains of Generation Xers actually
do work differently than mine.
Today's informational landscape is tangibly different
than the one into which I grew up. Hard as it was for me to do so, I found myself
asking whether this youthful tendency to throw things away, this lack of attachment
to materials they've created, represents a well-founded and even logical gut
reaction to today's infoscape. Perhaps today's youth, finding themselves in
a world of almost unfathomable info-clutter, reason that saving something only
contributes to an already untenable situation. The EMC.com web site (whoever
that is) displays a continually updating Worldwide
Information Growth Ticker (it can be embedded onto this page, which is a
nice touch, but rather unncessary). The already enormous number that this ticker
displays is constantly increasing - well beyond my ability to comprehend its
size. I still remember when, about 12 years ago, we thought that the few millions
web pages that AltaVista searched was enormous. A
bit over two years ago I reported that it was in September, 2005, after
having reached more than 8 billion pages, that Google stopped reporting the
number of pages that it indexed. At about that time Google, and its users as
well, apparently realized that reporting a specific
number, something that had previously signified the immensity of the web,
had lost any real meaning. Today, whatever number we might quote is well beyond
an amount that I really understand. As of this posting, for instance, EMC.com
reports that there are 281,000,000,000 GB of information out there, with
each individual's contribution averaging to
about 45GB. Faced with a reality of such unfathomable quantities of information,
maybe actively trying to throw things away, or at the very least, not saving
them, has truly become the most positive means
of coping.
Have today's youth really internalized this reality? Have
they learned this lesson? Perhaps, in a fashion that harkens back to
the concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics,
today's children are born with the culturally acquired understanding that even
if we throw something away, nothing is ever really
lost. More often than not, my generation perceives this idea as a threat,
as a warning that things we (or our children) do today are sure to come back
and haunt us. Youth are often told that a seemingly insignificant comment on
a discussion forum may one day make all the difference between getting a job
they've applied for or being rejected. But perhaps the opposite is actually
the case. Perhaps there's something comforting in the knowledge that whatever
we do that causes us to lose something - even simple things like spilling milk
on our homework, or accidentally ripping up a draft of a paper - we always have
the very real possibility of getting it back.
Taken to it's logical extreme, we may even find this quite encouraging - we
don't really have to worry about saving anything, because that vast database
of cyberspace is sure to have a copy of it.
In the long run, even if it's true that nothing can ever
really be lost, we don't necessarily have any real desire, or need, to find
it. Pack rats may find value in living with clutter, but they're perhaps only
the farthest pole of a continuum that encompasses us all. Even people who don't
hoard, who aren't personally engulfed by stuff,
are probably acutely aware that clutter has become a defining characteristic
of our lives, a characteristic that, one way or another, must be dealt with.
I find it hard to picture myself disposing of my stuff, be it things I've collected,
or works I've created. But in a world in which information is not only abundantly
available, but also threatens to overtake us, I'm almost capable of understanding
why kids might do so.
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