I have thousands of photos on a computer that I can’t turn on. I have files on floppy discs. I still have tape cassettes, records, and CD’s. I have videos of my kids on digital tapes that I can only play on the camera I filmed them on, although I’m sure I can still get them on to my computer if I tried.
And I have thousands and thousands of digital photos that will never make it into a frame. They will never see ‘the light of day’, and many of them might not even be seen by me again.
Talking with my buddy, Dave Sands, he mentioned that we have become data hoarders. But unlike those TV shows about outlier people that hoard physical things and clutter their homes and lives, we are all becoming digital hoarders!
Our phones used to be fancy if they could take half-MB images and now some phones are approaching 10MB. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 with 20k of memory (and I was excited to buy the 16k adaptor to get me to 36k), and now I wouldn’t buy a computer with less that 350G. We used to buy 250MB backup drives, now we are buying multiple Terabyte backup drives.
But will these drives be easily retrievable in 30 years? Or will we be searching for an equivalent to a tape cassette recorder, or an 8-track player, to somehow get our data back? Or, how easy will it be for others to access this data as we share more and more of it in the cloud?
Beyond the fear of others getting access, will we even want this data? When was the last time you looked at a backup file or drive that has data you no longer have on your computer or phone?
We have become digital hoarders, all of us. What implications does this have for us, or more specifically, for our future selves?
I find this such an interesting topic David. As I have said previously, it is a topic that Kin Lane has recently been diving into. Personally, managing everything from my own space has made me more mindful of what I share. I think that being more informed about what sort of information and data we are both collecting and collating. Although I am not sure what this looks like for the future, I think that centralising my data and practices makes archiving more doable.
Also on: Read Write Collect
I really like your collection of contributions on ‘Read Write Collect’ Aaron. I used to love a tool called CoComment, which let me track my commenting across any blog platform. I was sad to see that go.
I think it is our intentional sorting and collating that helps us learn and make connections, but now I do this in so many places, it feels watered down. I think you are on to something in the way you collect and share. Do you have a post about how you do this?
I think my ‘post’ for how I manage my ‘commonplace book’ is here, while I have collected all my IndieWeb related reflections here. If you are interested, I would also recommend having a look at Chris Aldrich’s site.