Digital Anthropology
It used to be that our attics or basements or garages were the places where we piled up the junk that we couldn’t part with but yet knew that we would sooner or later throw out. Plenty of that still goes on, but several phenomenon of modern life have given us respite from having to face our inner hoarders in a self-deprecating manner every day. The most obvious of these litter the roadsides of America and are now an entire industry, the self-storage market. I know there are lots of good reasons people have for renting a self-storage cubby or closet or room or garage or warehouse for that matter. I, for one, have never found justification in it and I eschew the damn things like the plague. I know people that are land-rich like to be commercially savvy and build low-cost self-storage units in the outskirts of every town in America, but if I ever found myself in that situation, I would be tempted to call my facility Denial Storage. The denial is about whether you really need this space for your junk and perhaps whether you were ever likely to use or even see most of the junk you put in the space. I am certain that almost everyone who drives by a self-storage place has the same thought as I do, its just a matter of whether they can admit to their conscious self that they really feel that way.
But our McMansion lifestyle in America gives us another out for this problem. The median house size in America has increased by 150% since 1980, and strangely enough, that has happened while the average household size has decreased as fertility rates have decreased during that same timeframe. While the number of attics and basements have decreased in our collective efforts to manage the cost of new home construction, and garages have become more and more necessary to actually house our multiple cars rather than our junk, we do have more extra rooms in which to hide and collect our miscellaneous stuff. In our home, those two places are the study and the guest room closets. No American builder in the last fifty years hasn’t understood that every bedroom needs a good sized closet and when those bedrooms turn to guest rooms, we mostly have to think of those closets as 10% dedicated to guest clothing and 90% used as a storage room that doesn’t get billed to us monthly.
The study in our house is now the most private room in our house. People occasionally wander into our bedroom. They may even need to use our master bathroom in a pinch. But who would or should go through our bedroom, past our huge joint closet and through our master bath to get to the door to our study. That placement was not of our choosing, but was just there when we bought the place and I have grown to respect it. That room off our personal space is sort of our inner sanctum. We have made it a joint study and we both have a desk in there and share the shelf and cabinet space. To be honest, I have usurped 75% of the wall space, but that is only because I got there first. I have now layered on my workout gear, so this really has become a cluttered but useful space. It all serves a very useful purpose, but none more useful than as a way-station for the junk that we are not yet ready to throw out. The beauty of that compared to a storage room is that we actually get to see and enjoy our memorabilia and junk since it surrounds us in there. That makes it a useful and very personal sanctuary, one that I would recommend to anyone trying to design their personal space for their golden, but not yet shriveled years.
By the way, our three-car garage, which never has more than one truck and two motorcycles in it, serves a very similar purpose as the study, only with more convenient garage doors that allow for even great access and usability. When I take my truck out, as I have today to make room for our party planning, the garage turns into being a staging area with a nice epoxy floor. The three sides that are not door are covered in open stainless steel shelving that allow for bin storage with all the seasonal things we might need access to. Again, not so very unusual, but very useful at least at this stage of life when we do things like actually give big parties every once in a while. We also have several outdoor lower-grade locking storage rooms that are half utility room and half paint and tool shed. Those are work-a-day places that make home maintenance more likely and more economical, so I don’t think of them as optional in the way the other spaces are deployed.
There are also unintended or vestigial spots here and there that could be used for storage, but which are more happenstance. I think of the drawers and cabinet by the big living room TV. The drawers were for all those video cassettes or DVDs that we now toss in the trash. Now they are never opened. The cabinet was for all the audio/video racks that we used to think we needed. Now, like the desktop computer has mostly been replaced by the self-contained laptop, that cabinet with its racks and wires could be almost completely eliminated except for one modem/router which can handle just about everything your heart and ears and eyes could desire.
I think everything I have talked about above I have at least once before written about, so here is the new part of the story about the things we keep. It’s the digital angle, which used to be about floppy disks and then little hard plastic cassettes and then hard drives (both internal and external for those who thought there was some advantage to being able to carry their storage room around with them or hide it somewhere no one could find it). Then came the cloud and places like Carbonite and Dropbox. Carbonite was the attic that you only went to when you were desperate. Dropbox is my digital study or garage, which is a necessary utility to my every day life. I do not know what will happen to my Dropbox when I die, but I image it will go the same way as the storage room that no longer serves its sole master. I think maybe we should have our caskets or urns fashioned like the ancient Pharaohs and Emperors, with a digital box that can carry our Dropboxes into eternity with us to protect and amuse us on our journey.
In the old days (which is to say when email and the internet began), I used to be very neat, digitally speaking. I always had an empty inbox and filed everything for ease of retrieval down the road. That ended somewhere along the line. I certainly don’t accumulate unread annoying numbered red bubbles on my screen icons, but I do let that old inbox just keep filling and filling. I delete many things that are pure junk, but the rest just stay there in my own private blockchain of life, leaving a path for any digital forensic pathologist to trace like an backwoods tracker. I unsubscribe to many spam emails I get, and let’s not get started with how hard it is to do that regularly and how easily those vendors find their way back into my inbox despite the unsubscription. But there are certain spam emails that I choose not to discontinue or even toss out. I do not know why I feel the need to keep getting emails from Costco, for instance, but I do. My regular vendors like Duluth and anything from Joe Biden or his friends also never get unsubscribed. I like NatGeo, so I keep all their stuff and yet I toss all the New Yorker stuff, go figure. I suspect there is a whole new area for scientific study that should center around our digital footprints and all the digital things we keep. Let’s see, that might be called Digital Anthropology (please say you heard that term first here).