But as many said, "digital" mostly made us realize they were other things than the "pure" content.
I believe our brain just crave as much sensations as possible, and writing, flipping pages, seeing a device move[1], touching, watching, etc ... basically the task of dealing with the physical world is not entirely a cost but a pleasure in itself.
On the other hand(sic) computers send you a massive amount of symbolic informations (think text search in folders, it's "faster" than any physical archive), that tickle another part of your brain but not all of it, also, I think that our brain doesn't actually like too much of these because it evolved to abstract flows into new concepts. And these concepts are either a bit hard or simply not exposed to the users (think relational queries). There's a detrimental mismatch.
[1] I booted a PIII desktop last year, to extract files from a TRAVAN backup tape. I cannot describe the pleasure I had watching that HP Colorado tape wake up and move. No matter how "slow" it was compared to anything today. It was so cool. Even the slick sound of tape moving ..
Something about holding music in your hands, feeling a drive seek the next track, pressing physical buttons to control playback -- it all feels terrific, and I didn't realize until this conversation that there's a whole generation who hasn't experienced that.
BTW those minidisc players still go for $200-400 on ebay!
There's something I recently felt deep and weird about. The society is a double rotating system. We live, we want to solve problems, the solutions become a new ground replacing the past, not solving it.
When I look at old tech (big hifi tuner, vu meters, etc), I still deeply love it. The electro mechanical beauty is still there. Same for video games, or old software (I love win3.1 and 95 to bits, if I could patch the flawed core without changing the UX of that period I'd do it...). Without the commercial need to appeal money that fueled future versions like XP or Vista.
I saw things like the pico8 project, which gives a somehow modern hardware but with 8bit mindset: low res, 256 colors. People made damn beautiful games out of it. Really cool animations, gameplay, design. No need for a PS4 pro. My new pleasure is tweaking old platforms to give them "modern" day usage. Like retrofitting BT in a car radio. Or modding an old HP calc (longer battery, usb).
Sony messed it up when they bought a movie and music studio, and started to hobble their own devices. The MD was awesome, worked for 40 hours on one battery, could to digital recording and replaying.
Damn you sony.
This is pure nostalgia. Bill Gates has always been about the money from day one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Bill Gates largely made his fortune by creating an operating system that OEM's would want to ship with their computer. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but Windows 3.1 and 95 were absolutely made for and to attract money.
Lastly, remember how it felt to listen to a tape. You didn't want to skip, so you just let the music play and go with the flow.
All of this is the paradox of choice and free will. We think we want ability to do exactly all we want when we want but it turns out it's not so clear cut.
We have Behance, Dribble, Pinterest, Instragram etc. all streams of great work which is kind of a different approach.
But I think there is value to the tangibility and history of creating these folders and having them there.
It's just a what humans find valuable kind of thing.
In addition to the physicality of the book, browsing them meant the viewer didn't need to sort through the cruft (someone had already done that work for them), allowing them to use their own energy/thoughts to build upon that work resulting in new ideas and creativity.
That is a wonderful typo.
When I worked at MetaDesign back in the late nineties and early zeros we had something called RedBooks.
RedBooks were most of the work we had done for a specific client printed out in tabloid size bound into a spiral back book and put on a large shelf system.
We also had a matriculate digital folder system with projects, searchable and the same pages as PDF plus much more accessible from your computer.
Guess which one we used the most?
With the RedBooks it was very easy to pull out the book and look through it for inspiration, talk about how we did this or that and so on and with the book we only put in the things that where somehow relevant.
The computer folders on the other hand had everything because, yeah well why not. But what they had in quantity it lacked in human relatable tangibility.
Computers are great when the amount of information become so waste that it's impossible to manually search through it all or if you need to share a lot of your things with other people.
It turns out that for all the great things computers can help us do it still haven't solved tangibility.