virtual orders

I'm thinking about the collections we keep that are immaterial/digital:
-songs
-lists
-facebook friends
-poems
-secrets
-email
-SPAM
-voicemail
-lists
-memory


Most interfaces essentially exist to order and display collections of information. Finder, Flickr, Facebook, del.icio.us, rss, etc. are the digital decendants of wunderkammer. In some ways, they retain the form and limitation of their ancestry (boxes containing items arranged according to the user's fancy.) Virtual space doesn't really correspond to physical reality, but we're accustomed to the metaphor. Though it now seems obvious, the graphical user interface (files and folders on the desktop) was a revolutionary development for Apple. I wonder if our interfaces will become less tied to the physical as we settle into virtual space. Or maybe there is something about the box and its contents that relates innately to the human brain.



"This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."
-Foucault, The Order of Things