Newfangled technological services are changing our Internet habits.
I love files. I like to rename them, move them, sort them, change the way they appear in a folder, create backups, upload them to the web, restore, copy, and even defragment them. As a metaphor for the way the information block is stored, I think they are great. I like the file as a whole. If I need to write an article, it will end up in a file. If I need to display an image, it will be in the file.
Ode to .doc files
All files are skeuomorphic. Skeuomorphism is a buzzword that means digitally reflecting a physical object. For example, a Word document is like a sheet of paper that lies on your desktop (screen). A .JPEG file looks like a painting, and so on. Each of these files has its own little icon that looks like the physical object they represent. Pile of paper, picture frame or Manila folder. It's charming, isn't it?
What I really like about files is that there is a single way to interact with them, no matter what is inside. Those things that I mentioned above - copying, sorting, defragmenting - I can do this with any file. It could be an image, part of a game, or a list of my favorite utensils. Defragmentation doesn't care, it doesn't make any difference what kind of file it is. I've loved files ever since I started creating them in Windows 95. But now, more and more, I'm noticing that we're starting to move away from them as a fundamental unit of work.
Windows 95. An interesting fact: a quick twitch of the mouse speeds up the OS. This is not related to the article; I just think it's interesting.
Growing volume of .mp3 files
As a teenager, I dabbled in collecting and digitizing vinyl, and I was an avid MP3 collector. In my collection there were a lot of MP3 files with a bitrate of 128 Kbps. You were very lucky if you had a copyist and could copy files to CDs and then transfer them to each other. The volume of CDs could be up to 700 MB. This is equivalent to almost 500 floppy disks.
I was reviewing my collection and painstakingly putting down music tags: IDv1 and IDv2. Over time, people began to develop utilities that automatically download tracklists from the cloud so that you can check and determine the quality of your MP3 files. I occasionally listened to those damn recordings, although I suspect that the time spent organizing and validating them far exceeded the time spent listening.
An app called The Godfather. He has a lot of possibilities.
Then, about 10 years ago, everyone began to actively use the "green app" - Spotify. With their app or website, you can stream whatever you want, whenever you want. I think it's very cool and convenient. But what is the quality? Is it better than my 128kbps MP3?
Yes, the quality is better.
In the course of all this, the 128kbps that we were told were "indistinguishable" from the huge WAV files that came out on CD turned into garbage. Now the bitrate of MP3 files reaches 320 Kbps. On the forums, people have been spectrally analyzing the files, creating bright green and blue charts, in order to "prove" that the files sound really good.
It was at this time that SCART Monster gold-plated cables became a real breakthrough.
The quality of the files on streaming services was quite good, they were available on more devices and you were given access to all recorded music, not just MP3s, as it was on your computer. You no longer need an elaborate collection of files on your hard drive. You just needed a Spotify username and password.
This is great, I thought, but I still have huge video files left. The internet is too slow to stream my videos.
Burying .png Files
I had a Sony Ericsson phone with the catchy name k610i. It was red and I really liked it. I could connect it to a computer and copy files to it. It didn't have a headphone port, so I had to use an adapter or the special headphones that came with it. In many ways he was ahead of his time.
Later, when I made more money and technology advanced, I bought myself an iPhone. No doubt he was wonderful. Black brushed aluminum, so black that it seemed blacker than darkness and medical glass - details that border on the ideal, seemed to be descended from heaven by the gods.
But Apple has made it much harder for us to access files. Images are uploaded to a large stream, sorted by date. Audio somewhere in iTunes. Notes... is this a list? Applications are scattered all over the desktop. Some of the files are in iCloud at all. You can send photos directly from your iPhone, by e-mail, and with a convoluted method through iTunes, you can access some of the files in certain applications. But these files are temporary, they are cached and can be deleted without any warning. It doesn't look like files from my computer that I carefully created.
I just want my file browser back.
On a Macbook, iTunes sorts the music files for you. They are processed by the system. Music is displayed on the interface and you can arrange it. But if you look under the hood, look at the files themselves, you can see rabbit holes, clutter, strange names and strange folders. "Don't bother with it," the computer says, "I'll deal with it for you." But I'm worried!
I like being able to view my files and have access to them. But now the systems that I use are trying to prevent this. βNo,β they say, βyou can only access through unique interfaces.β I just want my file browser, but that's now banned. This is a relic of a bygone era.
I can't get rid of the files, folders and controls I'm used to.
Windows 10: You can still work on your files, even though sometimes I feel like they're looking up at me.
Caching and dependencies of .tmp files
I started building my first websites back when 1-pixel transparent GIFs were in vogue and tables were considered the right way to create a two-column layout. Best practice has changed over time, and I've happily repeated the mantra that tables should only be used for tabular data, not layouts, slowly and painstakingly converting my trivial layouts to CSS. At least it wasn't a table, I proudly stated as I looked at my three-column layout, which didn't work properly in Firefox.
Now when I build websites, I run an NPM install and download 65 dependencies that end up in the node_modules folder. There are too many files. But I don't care about them. When I need to, I just delete the folder and run the NPM install again. Now, they mean nothing to me.
Many years ago, websites were made up of files; now they are made up of dependencies.
The other day I came across a site that I wrote about twenty years ago. I double clicked on the file and it opened and ran easily. Then I tried to run a website I wrote 18 months ago and found that I couldn't run it without running the web server, and when I ran the NPM install, it turned out that a few files (maybe one or two) of 65 an error occurred as a result of which the node could not install them and the website did not start. When I finally managed to get it to work, I needed a database. And then it relied on some 000rd party APIs, but the following CORS issue came up because I wasn't whitelisted on localhost.
And my site, consisting of files, continued to βpuffβ. I don't want to say that many years ago the sites were better, no. I'm just saying that sites used to be made up of files, now they're made up of dependencies.
.Ink link everywhere.
No files were damaged in the writing of this article. I went to Medium and started typing. Then my words were sent to the database.
The created unit was moved from the file to the database.
In a way, it doesn't really matter. The data is still the same, just stored in the database, not in the HTML document. Even the URL can be the same, it's just that in the background it retrieves content from a different storage type. However, the consequences are much broader. Content depends entirely on the infrastructure, not on the ability to work alone.
One gets the feeling that this reduces the value of individual creative skills. Now, instead of creating your own files, everything is just another row in a database table somewhere in the sky. For example, my article, instead of being in its own file, you can say "be on your own", is just a tiny cog in a big machine.
Copy of .bat
Online services began to infringe on the fundamental principle of working with digital files, which I considered fundamental. When I copy a file from one location to another, the file I end up with is identical to the file I started with. These are digital representations of data that can be copied with high fidelity, step by step.
Empty sheet of paper. 58 MB - PNG, 15 MB - JPEG, 4 MB - WebM.
However, when I upload photos to Google Cloud and upload them again, the resulting file is different from the one that was originally. It has been encrypted, decrypted, compressed and optimized. That is, corrupted. Spectrum analysts will definitely be furious. It's like a photocopy, where the pages get lighter and dirtier over time. I'm waiting for a Google AI fingerprint to appear in the corner of one of my photos.
When I AirDrop a video, there is a lengthy preparation process at the beginning. What is my little supercomputer up to? I suspect: "You're transcoding my video, aren't you"? And only later, when I finally get the file to a place where I can use it, do I find that it has been βpushed and pulledβ so many times that only its shell and that former glory are left of it.
Why is new content so important?
No more .webm files
Like most of us, I have a mess in my Internet services, more and more personal life is mixed with work. Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, Slack, Google Docs and so on. There are, of course, many others. WeTransfer, Trello, Gmail⦠Sometimes at work they send me links to Google spreadsheets, I open them and they are successfully stored on my personal Google drive next to a photo of a cute chicken that I shared with my mom and a document with a list of various computer mice that I was going to buy in 2011.
By default, Google Docs sorts all files in the order they were last viewed. I can't sort and order them. Everything is arranged in such a way that priority is given to the new file, and not to what is really important to us.
I personally don't like this transition from timeless content to new content. When I visit websites, they advertise to me the latest things I've viewed. Why should the new be important? It is unlikely that something that has just been created will be better than everything that has been created for all time. What are the chances that every time I go to a place, the pinnacle of human achievement collapses at that moment? Apparently, there is no sorting by quality. There is only novelty.
Library books - oddly enough, they are not sorted by the latest editions.
All these services, at least for me, are terribly confusing and inconvenient. The junkyard where our chances pile up. Maybe this is how all people manage their files? Whenever I use someone else's computer, I'm always amazed at the jumble of files they have scattered all over the place. All files are scattered randomly, there can be no talk of any order. How do they even find anything there?
These services have completely removed the whole point of files from our field of vision. This file is in Dropbox: is it the latest version? Or is it just a copy of what actually lives on my computer? Or did someone email a new version? Or added it to Slack? Strangely, this devalues ββthe contents of the files. I don't trust them anymore. If I look at the file in Dropbox, I'm like, "Oh, there's probably a newer version."
At work, I see colleagues who create files, email them, and don't even bother saving attachments to their hard drive. Their mailbox is their new file management system. "Did you get the table?" they ask. Someone views incoming messages and forwards them back via email. Is this really how we manage data in the 21st century? This is a strange step backwards.
I miss files. I still create a lot of my own files, but more and more it seems anachronistic to me, like using a pen instead of a pen. I miss the versatility of files. By the fact that files can work anywhere and be easily moved.
The file has been replaced by software platforms, services, ecosystems. This does not mean that I propose to raise a rebellion against all services. We cannot stop progress by clogging the Internet channels. I am writing this to mourn the loss of innocence we had before capitalism finally invaded the internet. When we create something now, our creations are only part of a huge system. Our contribution is a tiny part of this elastic database cluster. Instead of buying and collecting music, videos, and cultural treasures, we are subject to the power flow: paying and raging for $12,99 a month (or $15,99 for HD movies), but it's worth noting that this is all will work as long as we continue to pay. But as soon as we stop paying, we are immediately left with nothing. Without "their" files. Service is terminated.
Of course the files are still alive. We are just getting further and further away from them. I have my own collection of files. My own little world. Thus, I am an anachronism that somehow bubbles up at the very bottom of this edited list.
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Source: habr.com