Our home, and especially my work space, is living proof of a pre-web existence. It's not the books which clutter the shelves and all available desk space. These, after all, are primarily pre-web anyway, and the fact that my personal library is terribly outdated is more a function of having a family and as a result no longer buying many books for myself than of having become outrightly, perhaps overly, digital. I refer instead to the plethora of magazines and clipped articles that cause the real clutter, that long ago overflowed from the filing cabinet space allotted them. On the other hand, the proof of my conversion to digitality is visible only by default: I hardly subscibe to any magazines anymore. Of course I print out articles from the web (instead of clipping them from real, tangible, pages of a magazine), but I no longer come home to find another new issue of a magazine waiting for me in the mail. Nor do I fret over what to do with it once I've read it. (I know there are people who are able to throw these out without any qualms or discomfort, but I tend to think of these people as coming from a different planet.)

Actually, however, one might say that my subscriptions have increased. With the help of the web I view many more magazines than I would were I to read only what gets delivered to my door. It's even better than getting to the magazine rack in the university library, and it's the most wonderful and most threatening way to waste time that I can think of. (You think games are addictive? Try Arts and Letters Daily!) But that doesn't mean that I don't have to adjust to a different way of accessing all that information. Subscriptions are, after all, proto-push. You define your interest and it gets delivered to your door. The same can be arranged via the web, but few of us do. Instead, we bookmark interesting journals and then, because there's so much else that's available, forget about them, returning to them months later more as new discoveries than as old friends. So the present clutter is from print outs of articles from a very wide array of sources, rather than clippings from a limited selection of magazines. But it's still clutter.