Transforming the Digital into the Analog
Definition
A iPhone app called Snappy Postcards by Gene Ehrbar of Anomaly Inc. allows one to take a photo and send it to someone via mail. Grandmother gets an image for the fridge, and no E-mailing, printing, downloading, compressing, stamping, sending, driving is involved. It takes what is already there and compresses the space and time needed to get the data out of the black hole of storage.
The app is in private beta right now, but I’ve seen the printed postcards and they are very good [1]
“A personal strategy of recording and keeping everything raises concern that clutter may obscure valuable things and add to the burden of personal information management. Keeping everything may have negative side effects (such as distracted attention, information overload, and less-effective searching and browsing) (Digital memories in an era of ubiquitous computing and abundant storage. Published in: Communications of the ACM - Personal information management CACM Homepage archive Volume 49 Issue 1, January 2006). However, there is a difference between keeping everything and making everything visible; a technological solution can hide details and deletions, thus eliminating clutter and the oppressive task of managing it while still retaining the records personal records, especially over time and in context;
- Interpreting and correlating data from multiple sources to make sense of what we have;
- Viewing and interacting with records that are an accumulation rather than a meaningful collection;
- Keeping personal information safe without impeding our ability to access or preserve it; and
- Sharing this information in a way that makes sense in the face of changing needs, without creating so much overhead that we either share everything or share nothing at all".
