Sustainability of Bits, not just Atoms
Venue
Proceedings of the CHI 2010 Workshop: Examining Appropriation, Re-use, and Maintenance for Sustainability
Publication Year
2010
Authors
Manas Tungare, Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Pardha S. Pyla, Ben Hanrahan, Uma Murthy, Ricardo Quintana-Castillo
BibTeX
Abstract
In this paper, we discuss sustainability as it applies to digital artifacts and
personal information. We continually create and/or receive new information items in
the form of emails, files, photos, media, etc., but once these artifacts enter our
information ecosystems, they stay permanently and are rarely deleted even if their
intrinsic value is no longer the same as earlier. This impacts information seeking
tasks negatively, as users must now learn to navigate a larger corpus of
information, and leads to information overload. We describe the technological
causes of information overload in the context of existing finding, filing, and
refiling practices and information heirlooms. We conclude with an example of a
solution that can address this challenge.
