Computers have been fully embedded into the operations of daily life for at least thirty years at this point. In this historically relatively short time they’ve utterly integrated into capitalism, but almost all our working metaphors are still based on physical things.
The idea of a paper document in a manilla folder arranged into filing cabinets has persisted since computers’ inception. These are powerful metaphors that relate to real things. Big tech companies like Google have spent an awful lot of money trying to get you to not think about where files are stored on disk, entirely obfuscating file names and locations in favour of cloud-based search. This has been successful enough that educational institutions are seeing gen-z users with no working concept of the file and folder. So maybe things are changing, but for most computer users I think these physical analogies still reign.
Anyone who has worked on a document with other people knows what a nightmare this is in 2023. I find gen-x and boomers are very happy with Microsoft Word’s very literal analogue of a physical document, stored in a single file, transmissible and copyable, in the same way you would iterate paper documents. Millennials and younger in my experience prefer the Google Docs mentality: a single source of truth everyone works on together. But I know others who find this utterly bewildering as things don’t stay where you put them: it’s hard to work on perfect prose when someone else is changing the formatting and adding space to the top of the document.
Perhaps more annoying than that though for most is how proprietary it is. For those of us who use GSuite day-to-day, we don’t even notice the registration and login process and have generally well maintained Google accounts. But adding in even one person who doesn’t causes all kinds of problems. Multiply this by all the different vendors on the market and all of a sudden we’re all juggling a dozen logins for different services every day each with their own irritating login and password reset requirements. Really, this is a fancy social media app pretending to be a document editor.
So even though a Google Doc looks like a Word Doc in many ways, has many of the same affordances, can create the same outputs, these represent a much bigger and more profound shift in the way people think about doing work on a computer than I originally gave credit. Losing control of the fundamental underlying computer storage and application means we are in this murky land where it’s unclear what exactly it is we are doing, on what computer, and where. It’s no wonder that digital skills seem to be in decline as understanding the underlying concepts in computing now is nothing if not obfuscated.
On a community level, it’s still the things that mirror a physical document 1:1 that get used the most. So spreadsheets are the most wildly successful document format in the world for any kind of structured data, but database fundamentals are almost unheard of. Digital versions of posters and flyers are everywhere, and many people live out their Google Calendar, but getting people to publish in open formats like iCal is extremely hard to convince people to do (this is the focus of our flagship PlaceCal project). Signups sheets in Google Forms are ubiquitous, community-owned sharing platforms are not. Despite most people using 10 ‘apps’ a day, there is next to no cultural understanding of what an ‘app’ is.
We can perhaps think of these in terms of dimensions:
- 1d data is an unstructured document you can read such as a flyer, poster, or report.
- 2d data is tabular data like a spreadsheet. Generally this is structured visually for a human reader but not structured data in the sense a computer would need to process it.
- 3d data is a database. This is where multiple tables can be linked to provide routes through the data and the software has an understanding what the data is (e.g. it knows fields are email, phone number, relation to another table). These seem very hard for people to get their head around or see the merit of as we are really far out of anything with a real world analog at this stage.
- 4d data is an app. Apps in the modern sense generally represent a set of business logic and a database behind it. It uses structured data at its heart but the way you access this is linked to other factors like your user account.
It’s no wonder that as we go up the dimensions it gets harder to visualise and act on it. And perhaps things like Google Docs are actually a 4d app disguised as a 1d one. Unsurprising then that tech maintains it’s generally squeaky-clean, do-no-wrong, good-for-the-economy public reputation when there is such a (deliberately engineered) lack of understanding of underlying concepts.
I’m not sure the end of this thought process yet but this is perhaps the beginning of a meditation on what it is that tech is representing when it shows us a file. Is it an analogy for a physical thing, something purely virtual, or something in between? The answer isn’t always clear, especially given big tech’s financial incentive to obfuscate what it’s doing under the hood.