“Life in Folders” – An Offscreen Magazine joint

My greatest flaw is my memory. I’d wager that it’s our greatest flaw as a species. Our inability to remember certain things. The stress and hurt and confusion that comes from those lapses in memory.

It’s because of my memory – and in spite of my memory, probably – that I found such affinity with the web: its organization, its structure, its ability to remember everything. Technology has replaced the sticky parts of our memory with a kind of semi-permanent record – a rolodex, a record collection, a calendar, a life connected by data and stored in a mythical cloud.

That’s good, right? Or are we losing something by depending on artificial knowledge like this?

The fine people at Offscreen Magazine asked me to write about something – anything – and this is what I landed on. It’s about photography. It’s about information architecture. It’s about my faulty memory. It’s about organization, its place in our life, and why it matters.

It’s one of the things I’m most proud of, too, this short essay.

You can’t read it online – not yet. When Issue 6 goes live, I’ll post “Life in Folders” for you. But out of respect for the magazine – and because, seriously, this magazine is fantastic and you should just buy it already because Nicole Jones‘ very short but very awesome thank you letter to the web is everything I’ve wanted to say for a long time – you’ll just have to purchase it or wait a bit.

It’s worth the purchase. I hope it’s worth the wait.