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jakeisnt's avatar

Thank you for this post!

I disagree that folders shape our organisations; their impact is overstated here.

Folders were developed to model trees and other hierarchical structures. These were likely all all informed by hierarchical societies that humans have lived in, where king or chief has a family and thus a tree of succession.

The first modern corporations - the East India Trading companies - were modeled after the hierarchical structure of kingdoms and coupled to governments.

With the structure of the 'app', understanding of data is already starting to separate from folders; students are using free text search, long names, batched files - paradigms introduced by email, Google Drive, the Photos app, and other common utilities - to think about organisation instead: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z. This exploration of separating our understanding of the computer from an understanding of a folder is already happening in the classroom in real time!

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