This weekend the hard drive on Rachael’s computer unexpectedly died. She lost everything - - nearly two years of curriculum, grades, music, and more. It was a hard loss. But lesson learned.

Electronic media is playing an increasingly large roll in the lives of the privileged (if you are reading this, I consider you privileged). Based on this larger part I am curious to know why there isn’t a movement to find some way to externalize or decode electronic media so that it can share in our physical space.

Under the current model, the individual users that interact with the media are the sole transducers - - that is to say that the person interacting with the media becomes the medium through which that media exists in the physical world. When that person shuts off their computer the media that they were experiencing shifts back from the physical world into the digital realm.

This leads me to ask: If there is no one online to read a blog post, does that post exist? Sure this old Zen ponderance seems a little hackneyed, but I believe it elucidates my point.

As humans start investing more time into the creation of intangibles (electronic media that can be infinitely viewed, infinitely shared, but never held) I imagine that there may be some psychological / metaphysical disconnect that hearkens back to the ancestral environment. If the mental gear we are using now evolved out of the necessities of the ancestral environment, I wonder then how our brains and emotions will react to our inability to handle the fruits of our labors.

Perhaps our brains are flexible enough that the overwhelming quantity of electronic media starts to look and work like a viable currency, so that the fruits of our digital labors shine back on us in the electronic recognition of others. The fact that electronic media is so easily shared, and that recognition can come so quickly from so far, must surely help us cope with the simple task of self-assessment.

This brings me back to Rachael’s computer, and my original point. Since electronic media is so ethereal (so easily forgotten, so easily destroyed) I am surprised that there aren’t more people looking for ways to reconnect the digital world with the real world in ways that aren’t reliant on us as transducers.

When Rachael lost the contents of her hard drive, she lost information that she had collected, information that she had developed a personal relationship with. Surely some of that info can be re-gathered (CDs ripped, documents downloaded, etc) but most of it is gone… no proof that it ever existed, except in Rachael’s memory. Had, for example, there been a fire in our apartment, there is at least a chance that some of the precious picture of us embraced on a beach on a rock in Maine might have survived. A scorched little corner to remind us not only of the image, but the temporary nature of everything — a physical object that validates our experiences, our memories.

I am not sure if that is possible online.

There are a few attempts to bridge this intangible digital divide that I know of, and that are different enough to be worth mentioning.

I came across the Pocket Mod in November of 2005. This simple little web-based gadget allows people to carry their organized digital life with them, by converting their schedule into template that prints onto one standard size piece of paper, and then folds into a little booklet.

Harper’s recently wrote about the Prelinger Library. This library is a physical collection of stuff that is meant to bridge the way that information is accessed and interacted with online with how people work with stuff in the physical world.