this lack of agency is undermining our connections to the culture that we love. We don’t often think about bookshelves on their own, separate from what they contain, but they are great devices. They display books or albums, and you can choose from among the displayed options in a relatively neutral way. The collector is the only one who decides how to arrange their possessions, ordering books by author, title, theme, or even color of the cover—and they stay in the same places they’re put. That’s not true of our digital cultural interfaces, which follow the whims and priorities of the
...more