Everything is Miscellaneous Ch. 9-10

What makes the most sense to me is the description of photos for the first-order messiness example in chapter 9. I too have my fair share of pictures stuffed in shoe boxes and drawers. I bought photo albums for my high school graduation party and attempted to fill some of them to put on display, but you can’t possibly put all of your pictures in photo albums because some just aren’t worthy enough, and nobody really wants to have thirty photo albums sitting around (although that reminds me of an episode of “Girls Next Door” where Hugh Hefner has a library of scrap books—nearly 2,000 of them spanning his lifetime).

I never thought of how the value of the pile of pictures goes down the more you add to it. Weinberger says “the more photos you add, the less likely you’re going to be able to find a particular photo, and the bigger the hurdle to making the pile usable” (175). Here's a commercial I recently saw that perfectly describes this.

Sometimes I have a hard time finding my digital photos on my computer too, although it's not as bad as the photos in the shoeboxes. I have hundreds of pictures that I have at least tried to organize by folders on my computer, but it’s still messy. Weinberger says that the more information, or metadata, is attached to each photo, the more potential it has regardless of how messy it may be. This is apparent in the example that is given with Flickr, where we can acknowledge that messiness is okay as long as you can find whatever it is you’re looking for, which makes me think about my house. Although my house is clean, it tends to be on the messy side--clothes may be all over the place, books lying around, etc. (not complaining, we've just always been a very busy family). If my Dad tries to “clean” things up though, my Mom gets angry because she can never find anything afterwards. Even though it is “messy,” my Mom still knows where everything is. And if my Dad puts things where they don’t “belong” then you could be stuck searching for that one shoe you left in the living room for months, like that one photo you just can’t seem to find in your overflowing shoe box of memories.