terabyte drive in my computer. I am backing-up and consolidating my farm of external hard drives. I am researching RAID backup solutions. I have gone insane.

I think some have called this insanity “personal information management”; that much lauded activity in which an individual (quite possibly an OCD individual) sorts and resorts and stores his/her personal-information items (e.g., files, email messages, Web favorites, contacts) with retrieval in mind. Having just been knee-deep in a mess of digital files, it was clear to me that to date my personal information management technique had been the work of many, somewhat sentient, processors: Me, my applications and my devices. Each of us had a different idea of what a file hierarchy should look like. Thus, over the years, we collectively created a muddled set of incompatible file hierarchies. Each local decision we made—me and my applications and appliances—was, in some sense, optimized within the realm of local control and convenience. But the global picture, illuminated by my innocent shuffle, turned out to be unwieldy, and detours were necessary when the multiple possible breaking points got strained. None of us involved “owned” or understood enough about the global situation to be aware of the problem or easily fix it. That being said, in retrospect, it was probably up to me to be vigilant all along. But how was I to know vigilance was required? I was seduced by convenience and wanting to get on with my social, embodied

life. Tidying and maintaining my digital closets was not my top priority.

This all begs the question: Would I have done things differently had I known? If I had known that the merge and removal of duplicates was going to be such a pain, would I have not set up several different libraries? More likely, I would have done everything the way I did it and said to myself: “I’ll clean up later.” Hindsight is not foresight, and in this instance there was none to be had. How would I have known there would be clean-up? I have been dealing with layers of systems, each of which in itself was supposed to be the ultimate—and final— solution. (Each music format was supposed to be the one, right? And I am old enough to remember the day when 640K was supposed to accommodate anybody’s digital needs.)

Ultimately, I’m not unhappy about this unplanned cleanup. I am reminded of my friend who wanted a “crunchy crunchy thing” (aka a disposal unit) in her kitchen sink. When she spec’ed what she wanted, she realized it required a double sink. This double sink was larger than her current sink, which required the kitchen counter to be replaced…and on the story goes. A kitchen extension into where the garden patio had been, several thousands of dollars and many months of dust later, she has a gorgeous new kitchen, all sparked by the disposal unit and justified in one-step increments. She is happy, no question. But my point is you never know what is going to spark that life revolution.

Reflecting on my encounter with my shuffle and its consequences, I have some lessons to add to my ad hoc design principles:

• Lesson One—loosen control and good things might happen (or falling in love, even with a device, can change your life)

• Lesson Two—random can lead to order

• Lesson Three—digital order is an ongoing and time-consuming process, not an end state, not least because the world itself keeps changing around us

• Lesson Four—the solution does not lie in well-developed, mental models of individual devices and applications; it’s about charting multiple technological worlds of negotiated meaning

• Lesson Five— current, state of the art personal-information management does not scale to the bigger digital person I’ve become. Contemporary personal-information management concepts and applications, no matter how well scoped for my smaller self or my partitioned self (work/home/hobby), are pint sized, and therefore out of their depth when dealing with my digital ocean.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elizabeth Churchill is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research leading research in social media. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has studied and designed technologies for effective social connection. At Yahoo, her work focuses on how Internet applications and services are woven into everyday lives. Obsessed with memory and sentiment, in her spare time Churchill researches how people manage their digital and physical archives. She rates herself a packrat, her greatest joy is an attic stuffed with memorabilia.

May + June 2009

DOI: 10.1145/1516016.1516028
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0500 $5.00