Rich
I’ve been helping clean up, pack and organize the possesions of my friend Rich Ahern, who died a year ago in April. Rich left, among many things, an immense and neglected personal library of nearly 10,000 volumes. He also left thousands of 3″ x 5″ cards he used for organizing information he didn’t want to lose, kept in giant, old school library card catalogs. While he did turn on to computers for the last few years of his life (I’d often run in to him on the Diag, on the way to “play spider” on the web), he only ever used the Internet as an information retrieval system, from which he’d print the most useful information. I couldn’t help but think of Rich when I read The Social Life of Paper by Malcolm Gladwell.
The solution to our paper problem, they write, is not to use less paper but to keep less paper. Why bother filing at all? Everything we know about the workplace suggests that few if any knowledge workers ever refer to documents again once they have filed them away, which should come as no surprise, since paper is a lousy way to archive information. It’s too hard to search and it takes up too much space. Besides, we all have the best filing system ever invented, right there on our desks — the personal computer. That is the irony of the P.C.: the workplace problem that it solves is the nineteenth-century anxiety.
More Rich links:
- A puzzle of a painting he did of Marblehead, MA, his adopted home town
- His Y2k doomsday essay, published in the local lefty political rag. He always was a little too close to the tinfoil hat types for me…
