On the Character of Objects

Electrical devices don’t have character when they’re damaged, do they. I just found a small dent on my iPad near the power button. If you were to ask me if it now has character I would say “no, it’s damaged.” Buy a new iPad today and it wouldn’t have that dent.

But could it gain character? Maybe, if a long enough period of time passes for the article to develop a uniqueness of their own. How long? I guess it depends on the object in question, and how it came to be. You watch these shows of people touring old houses, asking for “character”. That’s an easy enough quality to get if the house is older than, say, the 1900s, before standards or manufacturing at scale became a thing. Each house builder had to choice but to do what they could with the materials they had access to. The houses that are more uniform, such as the Victorian era terrace houses built in England, has seen enough time pass that wear and the personal tastes of occupants would cause a natural deviation from what it was. Replace a view bricks a couple of decades and one could call that reparing damage. Do that several times over a couple of centuries and now it has character.

So maybe electrical devices do gain character, eventually. The fact that until recently this iPad looked and behaved like every other iPad means it won’t be a quick. But maybe after 50 years, when this iPad gets restored by the same group of enthusiasts restoring old desktops from the 1970s and 1980s now, it will gain some character.