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Hoarding the Ethereal: How We Have More Things (And More Problems) but with Less Clutter by Gayle Gatchalian

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Hoarding the Ethereal: How We Have More Things (And More Problems) but with Less Clutter by Gayle Gatchalian Gatchalian, Digital hoarding DRAFT: Hoarding the ethereal: How we have more things (and more problems) but with less clutter By Gayle Gatchalian ―21st century minimalism‖ may find a metaphorical equivalence to Martin Luther‘s 95 theses, a radical reaction to the excess of information in the 21st century as much as the 95 theses were a reaction to the excesses of religious authority in the 16th. Our world is one of informational abundance. There are more books, television shows, websites, and all sorts of other media messages, created every second than we can process in ten lifetimes, so 21st century minimalism emerges as a counter to this deluge. Adam Boettiger, a digital marketing veteran is writing a book entitled ―Digital Minimalism‖ and put the sentiment behind the movement quite aptly: ―In a World of More, Better, Faster, Cheaper, Less is More. Less is Better‖1. But why is less better? Kelly Sutton, founder of the website CultofLess.com which wasmade famous by a BBC News feature, said simply that ―I‘ve found that more stuff equates to more stress. Each thing I own came with a small expectation of responsibility‖2. At bottom, the essence of 21st century minimalism is a simple attempt to simplify life, to recover a sense of control from the inundation of information. Now that Kelly Sutton has divested himself of his possessions save two boxes and two suitcases, is his life infinitely simpler than before? While the project of reducing the clutter of one‘s property is a minimalist endeavor, it appears to skip an essential component of purging one‘s property.. The ―encumbrances‖ of personal, identity-forming, memory-related artifacts such as music, photos and books, that notion of responsibility Sutton identified with the ownership of physical property appears not to apply to these digital artifacts, when in fact it was the ability to offload these encumbrances to a hard drive that allowed Sutton to do CultofLess.com at all: ―he says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions‖ and that his ―external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps allow[ed] him to lead a minimalist life‖. It is interesting that while Sutton is able to retain ownership of media artifacts, albeit in digital form, he finds this liberating, when in fact his initial premise is that the ownership of anything at all is stressful. He even stated in the BBC article that with a ―cutting down on physical commodities‖ means ―replac[ing them with] digital counterparts‖ 3. And indeed, of the few things he retained, it was his access points to his digital property that survived: an tablet computer, an e-reader and a laptop. Digitizing property, I would argue, is not the same as divesting, for it still allows you to have everything you used to… it is just neatly compacted into a hard drive, or, with the rise of cloud computing, distributed out in the cloud. It is an illusion of less while having more. Another 21st century minimalist featured in the same BBC article was Chris Yurista, a DC-based DJ, who argued another point of appeal for subscribing to this lifestyle: ―his new intangible goods can continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance‖. Indeed, while vinyl records 1 ―About‖, accessed March 13, 2011, http://digitalminimalism.com/about/. 2 ―Here We Go…‖, Cult of Less Blog, September 14, 2009, accessed March 13, 2011, http://cultofless.tumblr.com/post/187688510/here-we-go. 3 Matthew Danzico, ―Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive‖, BBC News, August 16, 2010, accessed February 15, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10928032. 1 Gatchalian, Digital hoarding ―snap and wear down over time…. mp3s don‘t‖. He did add a caveat, however, ―worr[ying] frequently [that] hey may lose his new digital life to a hard drive crash or downed server‖ 4. The lifestyle allows one to easily have it all… but also, to lose it all just as easily. Sutton and Yurista‘s arguments point to the technological innovations that have allowed them to pursue this lifestyle: the digitization of media artifacts and cheap storage. But it also points to the contradictions therein: one ends up being a digital hoarder and life is more complicated, not simplified, by these technologies. In this paper, I first interrogate what makes 21st century minimalism possible and introduce the notion of ‗liminal materiality‘. I then argue that 21st century minimalism‘s principles actually contradict its purpose, discuss the implications of such a lifestyle and advance Viktor Mayer-Schönberger‘s argument to ―delete‖ as a response to these developments. Digitization and liminal materiality The digitization of media artifacts is a subset of the digitization of information in general. It is the ability to represent material objects in binary code, ―translating sensory information into discreet states‖5 that ―all equipment is- at least in principle- able to handle‖. Prior to digitization, media had a one-to-one relation with the content they held, for instance, paper only held text or photos and vinyl records only held music. With the digitization of information however, media technology has become content-agnostic, having a one-to-many function in that ―[a]s long as information can be digitized, it can be stored on a digital storage device, irrespective of… type‖6. Referring to the functionality of media as a ‗holder‘ of something speaks to the notion of media as ―container technologies‖. The concept of ―container technologies‖ can be traced to Lewis Mumford, who, in his 1961 book, The city in history; Its origins, its transformations, and its prospects, identified containers such as baskets or jugs, as an oft-ignored technology. A close reading of his 1967 book, The myth of the machine I: Technics and human development, led Strate and Lum to conclude that writing itself is a container technology, one that did not however, contain material objects such as fruits or water…it contained ideas7. Zoë Sofia expanded on this notion, extending the categorization of container technologies to all communication media technologies in general such as ―books, photographs and albums, the television, the stereo, cassettes and CDs8. She pointed to these container technologies as functioning like human memory, perhaps anticipating the concerns Mayer- Schönberger will, almost a decade later, raise: ―[w]orking analogously to the holding functions of memory… these electronic and print media are storage technologies for other spaces and experiences‖9. Her observation that ―the computer… is basically a storage technology for data‖10 sets the stage for the next usage of container technologies and anticipates 4 Ibid. 5 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete : the virtue of forgetting in the digital age, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009): 54. 6 Ibid., 55. 7 Lance Strate and Casey Man Kong Lum, ―Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics‖, Atlantic Journal of Communication 8.1 (2000): 68, 71. 8 Zoë Sofia, "Container Technologies" Hypatia 15.2 (May 2000): 189-190. 9 Ibid., 190. 10 Ibid., 188. 2 Gatchalian, Digital hoarding a time when the term ―data‖ will come to encompass media that were once distinct, i.e. the computer does not distinguish between song, photo, or document files. Writing in an era of now- pervasive digitization, Jonathan Sterne picked up on the notion of ―container technologies‖ to argue particularly for digital media technology, exemplified by the mp3, which is a container for recorded sound11. Indeed, from the perspective of the evolution of the notion of container technologies, one sees that the history of media artifacts as cultural objects is essentially a history of media/communication container technologies, from the analog container technologies with a one-to-one functionality of stone or paper holding text and images, photography, vinyl recording, audio/video recording on magnetic tapes12 to digital container technologies with the one-to-many functionality of floppy disks and disk drives, from magnetic, to flash, to solid- state and beyond. Digitization‘s conflation of once-separate media artifacts into indistinct ―data‖ hints at a fundamental change occurring at the level of media‘s ‗thingness‘. In arguing for the status of the mp3 as a cultural object, Sterne hits upon this key transition, from materiality to what I call ‗liminal materiality‘. As observed by musician/DJ Philip Sherburne in his review of a DJ computer program: there is an ―ongoing dematerialization (or perhaps a better terms could be ‗micromaterialization‘ since even mp3s live in silicon, invisible as they may seem)‖13. It is not dematerialization because the object still exists in some accessible form, though mediated through an access point such as the computer. Micromaterialization is a slightly better description because the artifact does get miniaturized in that it occupies a negligible volume in physical space, however it does not quite capture the state of ethereality that digital media artifacts have. What digitization does to cultural objects such as books or photographs is take them from the graspable material world and plant them in the ‗liminal‘ space between the material and the immaterial, thus creating liminal artifacts. It is the term ‗liminality‘ that best captures the unique existence of digital media artifacts. Writing on rituals, British anthropologist Victor Turner explored the condition of liminality in a tribal rite of passage, that condition where the individual is ―betwixt and between space‖, not belonging to the segment of society whence they came yet not yet belonging to the next segment of society they are supposed to join14. Merriam-Webster defined liminal as ―of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition: in-between, transitional‖15, while Oxford emphasizes how it is ―occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold‖16.
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