When The Daughter was little, I told Family Therapist and K that The Daughter could not learn to clean her room because there was no “away” to put things. That the number of things to be put exceeded the places to put them. I’ve been drifting to a whole new definition of “put away” and organization, that I tried poorly to express to my friend V. After a little event with my father yesterday, I think I’ve refined the definition.
“Put away” is indeed a condition, in the end one can look at something (or a place now cleared of that something) and say, “Yep, that’s put away.” But the thing is, the task or situation before-hand, there is NO “away” for those things. Imagine professional movers have magically transported all your things from one apartment to a new one. Boxes everywhere. Same stuff, new place. Now, tell me where “away” is. Sure, the forks will not likely have an “away” that’s next to the socks, the use of the item may generally select for or preclude certain places.
Nope, the new definition of “away” that I want to convey to you, dear anonymous reader, is that of process and not place. “Away” is a condition not merely of 3 spatial dimensions, but of the time-axis it took to get there. V, mentioned above, has a minor storage crisis in her home. Through much debate on this subject, I think she’s agreed to engage in a process of simply touching every single thing in her house. Not merely to re-acquaint but to refresh the place in its relation to how to get to that place.
I suspect that we can train ourselves to understand positional reference in the abstract. My father’s pretty good at that, one of the skills learned as a pilot. But realistically, we’re critters who learn placement by getting there. We know that gramma’s house is over the woods and through the hills. So too the horse, learns it by the process of getting there. Same thing with out manifold possessions. And why the desktop metaphor works better than the command-line for stuff stored on computers. Originally, the computer guys just thought it was the spatial relationship. And it can be, using folders in a perfect tree that anyone on first glance can decode. Ever see the shared drives at a big office? I work in the Land of the Geeks. People cannot make eye contact when passing in the hall. The fashion sense is appalling. The rudeness is epic. And the shared drive is the biggest disaster I’ve ever seen. The unbelievable crap and seemingly random placement of stuff is shocking. (I found a 1-gig item named “My Documents” the other day, untouched since early ’08. I can’t give you even a hint of the path, it would violate several banking regulations and federal information security laws. Yes, it was stored someplace that critical, that secret, that deep.) Sure, a lot of things like this happen by mistake. But in the computer case cited above, and in my dad’s house, there was a temporally significant reason. At the time, that place made sense. For everything. And the problem is, reconstructing the time. The item, resting in its place, gives no hint as to the process that got it there. But god help you if you move it. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS) where you can store anything literally anywhere, they keep an enormously detailed database of where everything is kept. The size of this database must be literally shocking, even if you decide that the smallest thing stored in it is a “1 cubic foot container.” (The standard bag for carrying stuff.) As we all know, the actual minimum-sized thingy in their db is a hell of a lot smaller, but I’m just trying to help you grasp the notion of tracking stuff in a 132 foot long tube with no gravity (to speak of). IN SPITE of this accounting, they must periodically take narrated video tours of the ISS, to synchronize the ground and the station staffs on where stuff has been put. The reason, I’d venture, is because the db stores item-location and the humans store item-process. Since entering a narrative of what you did with widget 1W345-BNC/500.11 rev 11.0.3.1666 is as tedious as writing the part number out (times 10), I don’t think us and the ‘puters are going to come to any equality in tracking stuff for a long time. In Cory Doctorow’s new novel “Makers” (serialized at www.tor.com and available for purchase at the usual dead-tree outlets) he proposes a world slightly in front of now where the maker-trend leads to an attempt to create a corporate exploitation of small, amorphous groups forming to create a new thingy, get it to market, then de-forming and re-aligning in new ways to make the NEXT new thingy. Our heros take common RFID technology to the home, tagging everything in the home, and recording on a db what the item is. The RF-part of the acronym allows the computer to find the thingy wherever you put it. So you go to a pc, scroll through the inventory until you find the scissors, and ask the computer to tell you where your roomie/spouse/child left it last. The pc shows you and lights up an LED on the closest architectural element. (Drawer, closet, table, etc.) The reason for this product is the enablement of “good roommates”. That big-picture reason is so unbelievably eloquent, the use of tech that cannot be useful to people (computers store item-info in a way your brain does not) to become useful to people in a way that lubricates one of the most difficult processes: human relations in a household. And this tech allows you to each have your own process. In fact, by eliminating the grumbling anger of never finding the scissors where you think they should be kept, you can observe the fact that your roomie always puts them over there when you think they should go over here. Then, a discussion can be started, a comparison of the relative merits. And a decision can be made. So if, with our competing processes, we cannot manage to live together, we can, with our enabling technology, get over the problem. To get to that point, we have to realize that there is a problem. And we have to figure out the root of that problem. I put to you, dear anonymous reader, that the problem of not finding stuff is that we’ve been treating location as the significant fact, the definition of “away.” I further posit that this is wrong, that our brains actually store the process. The process of use, the process of putting. We store the video of our use and storage of the item, not the x, y, z spatial coordinates. Please, take advantage of the opportunity to comment below. This is (I hope) as fascinating to you as it is to me.
