Like many of my Gen Z contemporaries, I was raised with the internet at my fingertips, and the digital realm served as a crucial component of many of my relationships. It took on the role of a location, a place I would go to meet my friends, or gather the things that mattered or belonged to me. My laptop was a storage space, library, movie theater and digital mall.
This sort of surreal clue of modern language was mentioned in Monica Chin’s 2021 article “File Not Found.” “More broadly, directory structure connotes physical placement — the idea that a file stored on a computer is located somewhere on that computer, in a specific and discrete location.” I’ve always found this fascinating, discussing the digital world with the same language we use to describe physical space. A lot of online verbiage follows a similar idea, talking about “locations” and “navigation.” I think it is profound, and it works as long as the users agree to believe in the concept.
I half acknowledged this development at the time, partly as a tongue in cheek joke at the expense of “kids these days”, but as I’ve grown into my twenties, I have a better perspective on what spending prolonged time in that environment actually does to a human. The digital space took on a serious tone for those of us genuinely invested, Instagram was a school yard without the school, just the hallways were teens hang around and try to get a response from one another. Infamously high schoolers regiment themselves into social cliques, self defining and then rebelling against a complex system of rules or social concepts. I saw this process overflow into the digital space firsthand, with unspoken rules flourishing about what the perfect timeline looks like, how your posts are to be formatted, who and what you include. The same people that identified these rules began to rebel against them, making secondary accounts for the designated purpose of engaging in less restricted digital environment. There were risks that come along with stepping out of line.
Chin’s article includes a conversation with college student Aubrey Vogel, who described a moment where she felt criticized for her online etiquette. “As much as I want them to be organized and try for them to be organized, it’s just a big hot mess,” Vogel says of her files. She adds, “My family always gives me a hard time when they see my computer screen, and it has like 50 thousand icons.” There is a certain stigma to having a messy desktop, or inbox, or social media feed. It’s almost analogous to having a messy room. We have developed social norms determining how individuals engage with the internet. The framework of the Bryn Mawr Digital Competencies, also touches on a similar detail, how you use the internet speaks to your intricacies as a modern citizen. One of the five main competencies listed is “Data Management & Preservation”, a war being fought on the battlefield of messy desktops everywhere.
Whether judgements on these grounds is fair or not is debatable, but a mild side-eyed response is understandable. What I am most curious about is how these trends differ among users of different ages. College aged digitally literate archetypes would be the ones who would be most likely to pearl clutch at a messy desktop, but the interview suggests it is the older generation who also sees the phenomenon. Ultimately every user will approach their personal digital space differently, and how they organize their items is their decision.