Showing without really telling.

Every picture tells a story, but a scan of a diskette tells us nothing about what's inside. Is it an autobiographical Word file? Or perhaps a few family portrait .jpgs? It could be an Excel spread-sheet. Nothing about the diskette itself tells us anything about the contents.

A diskette isn't like a present that we excitedly unwrap, hoping to be pleasantly surprised by what we find inside. There's no way to "unwrap" the diskette. What's more, we can't put it next to our ear to listen to it, or hold it up to the light to try and gaze into it. It's only accessible to us if and when we put it in the disk drive.

So a diskette is similar to an audio or a video cassette, and very different from a book. When we buy a book we can browse through it, feel it in our hands. Just handling the book gives us a picture (even if perhaps an inaccurate one) of what's inside, awaiting us. But not a diskette. It's lips are sealed, but not as though it holds a secret, but as though it simply has nothing to say.

What's on this particular diskette? It really doesn't matter. The diskette was chosen for scanning more for its color than for its content. Suffice to say that it contains a number of files (from about five years ago) which have be copied and saved in numerous other places. Yet even so, parting with it remains difficult for me.