I see a trend away from the computer filesystem model of storing things in folders:

• Gmail uses “Labels” to sort mail
• Google Desktop lets you search inside your documents, and caches locally all web pages you view, letting you search through pages you’ve seen
• WordPress allows blog entries to be assigned to multiple categories
• Flickr lets users assign “tags” to photos for easy searching
• Andrew Jones wants filters, not funnels
• mod_rewrite, the king of Apache translocality, makes it irrelevant where web pages actually are (if they exist at all)

The problem with folders is that you can only put something in one folder at a time. This problem is necessary for real-world objects like your phone bill, but it’s pointless to extend the limitations of physical objects to information objects that exist only as computer data.

The technical examples (OK to skip this part if you’re in a hurry):

Let me use Gmail as an example, since everyone loves Gmail. When I get a message in Gmail, I can assign a label to it. If I’m smart (or lazy, depending on your perspective), I can set up a filter that will look for certain things. For example, messages that have [Radical Congruency] in the subject line are probably comments on this blog that were emailed to me by WordPress. Since these are all archived on the blog, I have no reason to keep the emails (though it’s nice to get them so I know when I’ve had new comments), so I generally delete them. Accordingly, I’ve set up a filter to label all emails containing the string [Radical Congruency]. What comes next is powerful: I can select these tagged emails en masse by clicking on the following buttons in Gmail: Select: All, Read, Unread, Starred, Unstarred, None. This may seem like a trivial feature, but when you’re dealing with massive numbers of emails, it changes everything. I star messages I want to keep in my inbox, hit “select unstarred”, and hit “archive.” The messages that are no longer immediately relevant to me are taken away from my workspace, while remaining instantly recallable via search.

Compare this to Hotmail. If you want to sort your Hotmail messages, you put them into folders. But true to oldmedia form, each message can only be in one folder at a time. This is illogical, since folders are a way of categorizing things, and any number of categories could be used to describe and classify an object. For example, if I’m doing business with a friend, I might want to file that message under “Friends” and “Business,” but can’t with Hotmail.

WordPress is also innovative in moving data beyond physical location. It’s possible to create permalinks (the title of this post is a permalink) that include the post’s category in the URI (previously known as a URL), but this reflects an old-media, static information structure. What if I rename my categories? My permalinks break, reducing that most desirable currency of social capital in the blogosphere, the inbound link. The thing is, there’s no reason to embed any important information in the URI anymore. That’s because the address you see in the title bar isn’t to an actual HTML document; it’s rewritten by Apache Server’s mod_rewrite module to a path that looks something like index.php?p=545&showcomments=yes or something equally horrible, which pulls the page out of a database, on the fly.

With mod_rewrite, it doesn’t matter where things are. It really doesn’t - if you move something, you just create a rule to redirect people to the proper place. If you have old static pages, you can replace them (through a highly automated process) with static pages that redirect to the new database-driven URIs. They’re called Uniform Resource Indicators rather than Locators because stuff isn’t necessary located where the URI indicates. Try the search box in the right-hand column of this page to see how easy it is to generate custom archives (try Emergent Convention). That’s right searching this site takes you to an archive, not a list of search results.

How many times have you spent several minutes looking for a picture or other file that you knew was on your hard drive, but you didn’t know where? We have accepted this holdover from the physical world as necessary on computers, but it’s not. And forget using the Windows Find feature. You can search the entire Internet faster with Google than you can search your hard drive with this worthless feature.
–End of the technical part–

What does this mean for life, spirituality, real-world objects, and so forth?

• Location matters a lot less than ever before. We had dinner yesterday with some friends who’ve lived in Kuwait for a year and will be there another year. In the oldmedia world, we’d consider that relationship over, since being in a different place used to make friendship impossible. But not now. Translocality is here.
• People are less limited by geography in what they participate in. My dad lives in Houston and goes to graduate school in Alabama. ETREK classes you take in rural Oklahoma are taught by people in other countries.
• GPS and other navigation technologies have changed location from being a matter of qualitative directions and perspective to being a simple set of coordinates that can be called up or punched in instantly
• RFID and other object-identifying technologies are changing the way we view the location of physical objects. As this technology becomes cheaper and less subject to privacy concerns, we’ll eventually stop looking for stuff. If I want to know where my cell phone is in the apartment, I call it on another phone and listen for the sound. Imagine being able to do this for a paperback book or your favorite sweater. Punch it into GoogleMyStuff (or whatever we’ll call such a search engine) and you’ll see exactly where it is.

Tag-and-filter is replacing Find. It takes forever to search your computer for a specific file because that file is untagged and only in one place, and there’s no easily searchable index that allows you to filter the massive amount of data on your hard drive. It’s ridiculous, but it’s easier for me to find a file on my website using Google than it is to find a file on my computer using Explorer’s Find feature with the little dog.

It’s also no longer important to remember where a scripture is located. It used to be the highest virtue and sign of spiritual maturity to be able to quote book, chapter, and verse. Now it’s a quaint parlor trick, and it’s not that being able to access scripture has become less important. It’s that the old technique memorization has become far less efficient than simply searching a computerized bible. I have one on my PDA. I have one on my computer. There are dozens on the Internet. Memorizing where something is is now pointless.