[HN Gopher] Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study
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Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study
Author : Caiero
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-11-13 17:10 UTC (9 days ago)
(HTM) web link (publicdomainreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicdomainreview.org)
| cl42 wrote:
| When I was in undergrad, I worked with Barry Wellman (one of the
| early proponents of Social Network Analysis). One of his research
| projects back in the 1970s-90s was interviewing people about
| their home offices, and they'd have them take photos of their
| desk, computer setup, etc. Really cool stuff to see how people
| decide to focus. I wonder how much it's changed?
|
| This is a nice article going in the other chronological
| direction!
| Aeolun wrote:
| Did many people have home offices in that period?
| cl42 wrote:
| This is a really interesting question because I think the
| definition of a home office has changed quite a bit.
|
| In North America, there was a period in the 80s and 90s where
| the Desktop PC was very much a shared device. You'd have it
| sitting somewhere like the living room or basement, maybe
| near the TV, you'd have a landline phone next to it, etc.
|
| I think a lot of families had those, but it's very different
| from the idea of a "home office" where you have a
| separate/isolated work room.
| OJFord wrote:
| Perhaps more common than now, even with the resurgence from
| remote working, I'd say.
| kalupa wrote:
| Anecdotally, my grandfather had a more extensive home office
| than I do. He never took work home with him from the company
| office, which he exclusively worked from. This would've been
| the 80's when he was employed as an engineer manager in
| aerospace
| vundercind wrote:
| _The Official Preppy Handbook_ (tongue in cheek, of course,
| but its observations are often basically accurate) describe a
| dedicated office as a fixture of (what Fussell would classify
| as) upper-middle-class homes. Nb that class has historically
| had more flexibility on working from home than the rest of
| us, and generally been accustomed to looser restrictions and
| more freedom to set their own agendas (this has shifted with
| the intrusion of MBA- and finance-types into the strongholds
| of this class, like universities and hospitals, but that's
| another topic) That account was published in 1980.
|
| My background is a mix of Fussellian mid- and upper-prole and
| regular ol' middle, and an office _space_ , if only a roll
| top desk tucked in a corner, but a room if space allowed, has
| always been a feature of my parents' homes.
|
| Pre-computer, that's where paperwork and mail and other
| records that needed to be stored and worked with too long to
| live on the kitchen table (see: home space use studies, which
| spawned the misguided trend of building desks into kitchens
| in American houses) went. When desktop computers became a
| thing, that's where the family computer went. (Yes, kids,
| even when we got the Internet at home, it was still located
| in a physical place you had to go and remain to keep using it
| --what a change smartphones have been!)
|
| _This_ version of the home office as a hub for personal
| document and important-paper-stuff management is basically
| dying, which is why it may seem surprising they ever existed.
| I don't even need a laptop for most of this stuff, let alone
| an office--nearly everything important happens on my phone,
| and that's becoming more normal. I don't even need a kitchen
| table for it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I actually have a home office with built in desks, file
| cabinets, and bookshelves mostly for computer-related
| books.
|
| But my dining room/kitchen is lighter and airier. If I'm
| not shuffling a lot of paper, using dual monitors, or doing
| the rare video call, I mostly use a laptop downstairs.
|
| I do prefer to use a laptop over a phone for most things
| though.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| A man's desk/workbench or an equivalent is a glimpse into his
| thoughts; everything exists and is where it is for a reason.
|
| Any time I look inside my SSDs and HDDs I am satisfactorily
| horrified.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| > If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what,
| then, is an empty desk a sign? -- Einstein (but probably not
| really)
| labster wrote:
| No desk is truly empty, as each desk contains lots of
| spacetime, as well as particle-antiparticle pairs which exist
| only briefly.
| jajko wrote:
| Tons of Zero Point Energy to weight on when using such desk
| contingencies wrote:
| The unbearable value of potential. Similar to a blank
| notebook or whiteboard. Or good land eviscerated for lawn.
|
| The other day, after cleaning my own desk (~4 months of
| accrued detritus), I thought it would be good to invent a
| desk filing system where the benchtop can be moved out of the
| way and a different workspace can be deployed, similar to
| virtual desktops. A sort of 'physivirtual' desktop. I might
| just try that at home. My sketchy idea was a vertical cable-
| driven elevation, followed by a horizontal filing in to
| ceiling and wall-suspended racks for storing the array of out
| of use desktops. Electronics in particular is frustratingly
| object-laden, and any dense workspace array of test equipment
| tediously immobile. The biggest problem would be vertical
| space: in a typical room only 3m is available and 2 of that
| is taken for standing, leading to a maximum benchtop count of
| 2-3 which is insufficiently attractive to justify the
| investment.
| Aeolun wrote:
| My thoughts are a jumble of everything I've thought about and
| messed around with in the past 3 months or so?
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Are you me?
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Very much worth reading. Excellent. I didn't know
| publicdomainreview before either.
| 5040 wrote:
| As someone who has always been a collector, I found this
| particular article very interesting:
|
| https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/redressing-the-balance-...
| klez wrote:
| > We must reserve a back room [une arriereboutique] all our own,
| entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our
| principal retreat and solitude
|
| And thus the man-cave was born :)
|
| My dream house would have a big study with books covering the
| walls floor to ceiling and a big wooden desk in the middle, like
| the one in Palazzo Revoltella in Trieste[0][1] (by the way, goo
| see the Museo Rivoltella if you ever go to Trieste).
|
| The current small room I work from is something already. At least
| I can close the door when I call customers and team-mates. Heaps
| better than when I had to work from the living room. But a bit
| more room (and not having to share the space with the pantry)
| would be nice.
|
| [0]
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/33/47/20/3347206a9602a062ee8f...
|
| [1]
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/04/99/fb/0499fb98b756a2511c40...
| mapt wrote:
| Add a copy of Library Genesis in a rack in a closet.
| contingencies wrote:
| This. And a garden, and a microscope, and an electronics lab,
| and a mechanical workshop.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _At least I can close the door_
|
| Just as a reminder for the youth: in the ancient times, doors
| used to be _de rigueur_ for professional software folk.
|
| (I don't know which of you all messed that up, but whoever they
| are ought to be ashamed of themselves)
| klez wrote:
| When we moved office from one with actual rooms with max 4
| people in it to an open space I cried a little internally.
| Our boss proceeded to extol the virtues of an open space for
| exchange of ideas and collaboration. Guess who was a stable
| occupant of one of the conference rooms after less than one
| month and stopped coming to the office altogether after a
| while.
|
| Working from home now is bliss. If I'll ever start working in
| a shared workspace again I want an actual office.
| _0ffh wrote:
| I remember seeing a guy selling his book about practical
| software engineering and project management at a trade show
| some 25 years ago. One of his claims was that he had a
| statistic that showed that a closeable door and muteable
| telephone resulted in 10x productivity for programmers / sw-
| engs.
| breckinloggins wrote:
| My study is modest: just a spare bedroom that serves as a home
| office, sanctuary, and musical practice room... and with a few
| cheap bookshelves to turn it into a "library" as well.
|
| Still, I have not always had the means nor the space for such a
| luxury, and it's one of those things that I never take for
| granted.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| This describes my study perfectly. It truly is a sanctuary. For
| the most part I avoid using it for work, so that it can serve
| as a complete escape from that part of my life.
| breckinloggins wrote:
| I am thinking of making this transition as well.
|
| As I age I realize how much of life's moods are intertwined
| with physical places and their emotional associations based
| on what I do in that place every day.
| woohoodddd wrote:
| My study is the library. My favorite place.
| hammock wrote:
| Whats going on with all the drawn-in stuff on the photo of WEB
| Dubois?
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(page generated 2024-11-22 23:01 UTC)