Digital Ephemera and Its Uses
I talked about this a little in 6.b Social media and anti culture but I'm interested in the concept of def.Ephemera in general and with computers in particular.
Most content on the internet would fall into this category; I'm not trying to be derisive at all. It's designed specifically to serve a purpose and be discarded after that purpose has been met.
But i think that maybe we haven't fully internalized that, in a big picture sense. Maybe that's just me being an out of touch millenial or something. It might be that zoomers and gen alpha kids treat their digital "objects" the way we treat a takeout menu, or maybe it'll go the other direction; we'll have kids who think that older digital artifacts are incredibly valuable. 1.c Nostalgia can be short term after all.
There's a downside, though. Digital "goods" aren't real. I mean, they have meaning and effects on the world or whatever, but you know what I mean. They're intangible. That's part of why they feel so "lost," and why some people make an effort to preserve them.
But I think that maybe there's also a complication with, like, place, I guess? All of my digital life is kind of all in one place because we are only just now getting a real sense and intuition about what's important and worthwhile. For example, it's pretty easy to tell, just from the sense experience of the object, the difference in quality and value of a physical book. Doing that with an app, or a file, or a folder, is nearly impossible.
What ends up happening is that all of this information, all of this material, is by default on the same "layer" as everything else. There's not an immediately easy way to understand it, since. it's all mediated through the tips of our fingers and an LCD (or OLED!) display