In Defense of the Floppy Disk

Connor Tomas O’Brien:

Those who believe that the floppy cannot represent saving a document because nobody uses real floppy disks anymore miss an important point: while symbols initially piggyback on the meaning we assigned to a material object in order to stand in for something more abstract, once a symbol is used often enough, the symbol itself is enough to carry meaning, and the material object is no longer important.

I attempted to respond to the original discussion on Branch, but I gave up. I couldn’t phrase my opinion—nearly identical to the one quoted above—as well as Connor has articulated his.

/via @dstorey