I’d like to take pride in the thought that I belong to the information age. With all the good things there are, there is, however, one really painful side effect – Information Hoarding.
In the simplest terms: I don’t feel like deleting anything, ever. Of course, GMail and the ever dropping prices per GB of hard disk space don’t help. And the worse part of all this – the digital hoarding follows me to the offline world as well – and it doesn’t port very well there, given the lack of real-estate-space and all the junk that accumulates.
The logic is simple: There’s no reason to really delete or destroy stuff, unless it is really sensitive, and even then, there’s encryption. Moreover, you never know when you might need something tomorrow, in some way that you didn’t account for today. Then you’d thank yourself because you didn’t destroy it yesterday.
The biggest bane is of course, finding what you have when you need it. Leaving aside the really unique things for which I don’t have any alternatives, I often find it easier to grab a new download rather than search for that needle of information in my now close to over three terabyte of hay-stack. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve tried every search solution that exists today, and frankly nothing really helps me, and I’m not that disorganized.
Certainly, sometimes this information hoarding does make for some really nice surprise nostalgia. I once found some really silly skit I co-authored when in my fifth grade. Unfortunately, I lost the climax to it. Then there was the very first attempt at philosophy – and boy, how crazy was I! Greetings, lovey-dovey letters, emails arguing about the pros and cons of a Intel Pentium 133 MHz versus a Intel Pentium 166 MHz with MMX, my first free email provider registration, a first-grade math notebook, marksheets from my pre-KG and a doctor’s prescription for cough medicine from 1989!
All of this makes me feel a bit sad – why wasn’t I born a few decades later? That way, I’d be able to record every ephemeral second, in every sense that I felt it when it happened. And then being able to get back to it instantly. Yes, all you nit-pickers may point out the obvious problems with that. But for now, I’d like to stay in my bubble and imagine only the positive aspects of such a detailed recording.
Another real issue that plagues me currently: security of this stored information. Not in the sense that someone might steal it, or worse, use it against me in some way – I’m not all that important, yet, for someone to warrant spending all that effort – but in the sense that storage today isn’t entire reliable. The venerable Winchester drive, or the HDD as we all know it today, isn’t meant to last for ages. CDs / DVDs and now the HD-DVDs and the Blue-Rays last only for a decade or two in the real world. So there’s some sort of a false sense of security that we all have, that the information we’ve stored digitally is really secure and retrievable tomorrow. And I’ve not even started enumerating the issues with formats and compatibilities. Not that the offline world is any better suited, but still.
