Almost every house has one, the drawer with unidentifiable keys, screws and screwdrivers, picture hangers, the lost and found and lost again: You name it, it’s in there. The junk drawer has its place, and everyone in the family knows where it is, even if no one is quite sure about its exact contents or how it became the “junk drawer.”
Some form of junk drawer has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Such “drawers” appear to be an inherent part of human society. Want proof? Go to an archaeological dig, where, in some corner of the excavation you’ll see an accumulation that the diggers use to make “sense” of an ancient culture. Now fast forward to your junk drawer’s contents, long lost and buried and subject to a dig.
Whoa! What were these people thinking? What’s this gizmo? What’s that one? All these things must have had some use. Otherwise, why would they collect them in a single place? Look how we interpret place. What we find is a hidden history now revealed in a chaotic mess of seemingly unrelated pieces.
The junk drawer of humanity is also seemingly a chaotic accumulation of unrelated pieces. Two hundred thousand years of accumulation, re-accumulation, disuse, reuse, neglect and rediscovery: Every generation goes through the process. If we assign a generation to an arbitrary period of 25 years, then 8,000 generations of humans have had junk drawers, though, obviously, the last ten "industrial" and "technological" generations have had more and more diverse stuff in the drawers.
And now we’ve added a new kind of junk drawer that we call the Web. It houses just about everything, including pieces like this, in a place we identify as “cyberspace.” After about 8,000 generations of identifying history by junk in a dig, we can now identify it in a “space” that isn’t really a “place.” We can access everyone’s junk drawer, and that means we now have a different idea of place from what thousands of predecessor generations recognized by tangible, though often jumbled, pieces.
Place is now different for us from what it has inherently been for all life prior to this time because we have added cyberplace. Both have junk drawers. Would you mind if I looked inside?
Some form of junk drawer has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Such “drawers” appear to be an inherent part of human society. Want proof? Go to an archaeological dig, where, in some corner of the excavation you’ll see an accumulation that the diggers use to make “sense” of an ancient culture. Now fast forward to your junk drawer’s contents, long lost and buried and subject to a dig.
Whoa! What were these people thinking? What’s this gizmo? What’s that one? All these things must have had some use. Otherwise, why would they collect them in a single place? Look how we interpret place. What we find is a hidden history now revealed in a chaotic mess of seemingly unrelated pieces.
The junk drawer of humanity is also seemingly a chaotic accumulation of unrelated pieces. Two hundred thousand years of accumulation, re-accumulation, disuse, reuse, neglect and rediscovery: Every generation goes through the process. If we assign a generation to an arbitrary period of 25 years, then 8,000 generations of humans have had junk drawers, though, obviously, the last ten "industrial" and "technological" generations have had more and more diverse stuff in the drawers.
And now we’ve added a new kind of junk drawer that we call the Web. It houses just about everything, including pieces like this, in a place we identify as “cyberspace.” After about 8,000 generations of identifying history by junk in a dig, we can now identify it in a “space” that isn’t really a “place.” We can access everyone’s junk drawer, and that means we now have a different idea of place from what thousands of predecessor generations recognized by tangible, though often jumbled, pieces.
Place is now different for us from what it has inherently been for all life prior to this time because we have added cyberplace. Both have junk drawers. Would you mind if I looked inside?
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