I work in a corner of the software industry where business management applications have evolved from their rudimentary 1980's origins and where at the same time, the principles of how people should use those applications, particularly in the area of data disciplines, have also evolved.
For example, we learned quite early on that the pre-school data principle of preceeding zeroes was important because a record coding sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4 - 99999 doesn't sort well compared with a sequence like 0000001, 00000002, 00000003 and so on. And also early on, we devised methods for combining different coding analyses into single codes, like AS012003UK is really AS-01-2003-UK.
Things have moved on considerably since then, of course, but increasingly data appears to be playing a more important and prominent role in our everyday non-working lives. Like our mobile phone address books, do you use forename/ forename, surname / surname, forename or just non-intelligible anarchy? (fyi I'm 100% surname,forename apart from family members.)
What about our MP3 collections or the thousands of digital photgraphs that occupy our hard disks? - again fyi I use a 2003-10-20 format for photo subfolder names.
Being vaguely of a data persuasion, I've studiously codified my most of my personal digital stuff - but not all of it - to be accessible in as sensible a way as possible to me, to aid searching or just better organised archiving.
This is something that's not inherently easy to do in Windows as there's no inbuilt data management or indexing at an operating or filesystem level, so you have to devise your own coding structures if you want them, relying mostly upon sorting by filename and date to get you by. A future version of Windows is supposed to have a proper indexing filing system built in and that may help a little, but it's 3-4 years away it'll be a chargeable upgrade so this won't do anything to help us organise our digital stuff in the short term.
Is random, badly structured data actually a good thing in an organic, gritty sort of way or is the inexorable slide into immaculate uniformity an inevitable and necessary consequence of achieving a truly connected and digital life?
But in one sense, perfect and structured uniformity seems to be somewhat at odds with the organic like forms that can appear when you graphically represent things like interconnected FOAF profiles, for example but having said that, I suppose that the uniformity found in phenomena like the Fibonacci Sequence and the Mandelbrot Set can take on a lifelike form too.