Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [34]
One other benefit of this system is that, because all the photos live in one place, it’s easier to back up an entire photo collection (or transport them to another service). The “other essentials” chapter describes how to back up files, but it’s worth making the point here because of the importance of photos. Losing one’s documents can be a real problem, but losing one’s photos can be devastating. Keep your photos well-organized and back them up regularly.
Simplicity is the key to bit-literate photo management. Tags and other metadata are purely optional. Users don’t even need to enter captions or names for their photos. Except for taking lots of photos, filtering them, and moving the good ones into the right folder, there’s no other interaction that bit-literate users need in order to properly organize their photos. With this tiny amount of discipline, users can finally take control of their photo bits.
Chapter 8: Creating Bits
If you have to say something, keep it short.
Any bit-literate discussion about creating bits—text, photos, audio, or anything else—must first acknowledge one glaring truth: we have plenty of bits already. Every time you send an e-mail, take a picture, or create a Web page, you’re adding drops into an ocean that’s plenty deep enough. Are you sure your message is important enough to add? If so, then at least be empathetic to the recipient. Create the bits in a way that will deliver your message without adding to the overload that the recipient may already be experiencing.
The core statement of bit literacy, “let the bits go,” is amply relevant when creating bits. Being effective and empathetic means delivering the message in as few bits as possible, letting go of all the other possible bits that could be included. After all, the more bits a message contains, the more time and attention it requires for the recipient to get through it. Shorter is better.
This isn’t a new idea, of course. Books on good writing have always encouraged brevity. Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style put it best: “Omit needless words.” What’s different today, though, is the vastly decreased amount of time people have to read, watch, or listen. There are too many bits, and too little time, so brevity is now more than a suggestion. It is essential.
To be clear, the goal of brevity isn’t to conserve computer memory, or somehow to go easy on the “plumbing” in the network. For all but the biggest files, there’s plenty of bandwidth to transmit them across the Internet, and plenty of hard drive space to store them when they arrive. Hardware today is powerful and abundant, and it’s getting more so all the time. What’s scarce is the time and attention of the people who are receiving the message. A bit-literate message, in any form, is respectful of that scarce resource. This means:
When writing an e-mail, be short and to the point.
When displaying photos, only show the best ones—never duplicates or bad shots.
When creating a website, make sure the point of the site is clear from the first glance of the home page.
There are many other kinds of bit-based messages for which the same rule applies. In all cases, the constant question should be “Is this necessary?”, asked at every level: “Is this paragraph necessary? This word? This pixel?” The bits in any message—whether textual, visual, or otherwise—should be as few as necessary to deliver the message.
We’ve touched on this idea in previous chapters. The photos chapter, for example, showed how to filter photos. The media diet chapter showed how to say “no” when invited to engage new bitstreams. Whether creating or receiving bits, the goal of bit literacy is to omit all irrelevant bits so that the ones that remain