Digital life cruft
I just handed four heavy boxes containing most of my possessions to two dudes in an aging, unmarked white van. Part of me wishes the stuff would just disappear for good. I don’t really need most of it, and I’ll have mixed feelings when it resurfaces on the west coast. Oh great, my stuff.
When moving I’m always surprised how much I have. Books, clothing, bed stuff, kitchen stuff… all packed up and schlepped or shipped. Furniture and other items stuffed into rental cars, sold or given away. Jenn and I are actually fairly minimal. I know people with much, much more.
There is one particular blob of supposedly important crap that I keep in a shoe box: keys and keychain toys, photos, erasers from japan, tech liner pen, film canister filled with worry people, sea glass, business cards, a flashlight… I rarely look at any of it except when packing. It just sort of sits in there, and slowly grows. I try to throw parts of it out, but it never goes away. And occasionally it multiplies, with one blob going into storage or into an attic, and the other coming with me. It’s a sort of passive scrapbooking.
And of course we are increasingly having to deal with the digital equivalent of this life cruft. I’ve been hauling around some files since I first started typing up papers in 6th grade on school computers. This old work just gets further buried at each stage, lost among the bigger, newer, more seemingly relevant stuff, sitting somewhere within “old” within “school” within “archives” within “backup”. I’m always careful to take it with me even though I don’t ever look at it. Why do I hold on?
And how does this cruft effect apply online? Are my cluttered, disorganized del.icio.us bookmarks anything like the stuff in this shoebox? How about photos or videos? Somehow it feels like less of a burden just because it is removed, sitting on some other server instead of my own hard drive. If eventually all our data is out there in the network, will we always hold onto it? Will we no longer benefit from a good purge?
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August 3rd, 2007 at 5:34 pm
I’m reading through your blog entries and I see so many parallels, but this posting probably hit me the hardest, since I lost a great deal of cruft, especially lately. I dunno, but I believe that some data should stay private, never touch the “innerwebs” — and those of us with old floppies that are dead and old cdrs that are no longer readable, with our greatest memories just reordered ones and zeros, I think we feel loss on a slightly different scale… in part because we’re not given the choice whether to lose a lot of data-related things. They’ll time out, get turned over when companies come & go, get lost amid the wreckage or amid dead backups or crashed hard drives. When you lose big chunks of it, it can feel like you’ve had time stolen away from you, a bit — nothing to show for anything. I worry that kids growing up these days will inhabit the virtual world so much that they’ll lose out on the physical and the touchable. Hold onto those boxes. You may not think they’re very valuable, but one day you’ll be sifting through them 20 years from now and go… oh, yeah, I remember that… wistfully, maybe even longingly.
I think to benefit from a good purge you have to have the power to control it, to choose it. What about when you CAN’T have a good purge? Or when your purges get chosen for you? Seems to me that that could lead to a big lack of trust in the world…