Various recent events have me pondering. At what point does the amount of digital content we have become a burden? In the age of “more”, when does “a lot”, become “too much”?
Why do I have Carrie Bradshaw’s voice in my head?
Leaving the exquisite Ms. Parker (or Mrs. Broderick if you prefer) to one side, for I’ll get back to her later, the topic of digital content is a current constant around these parts. Hell even the name of this blog hints at my general leanings in an age where content = information.
With the presumption that I’m already informationally overloaded, should I continue to consume and obtain, adding more and more digital content in the vague hope that some far off tipping point will be reached when, in the blink of an eye, a sticky idea will come along and all our digital woes will be answered. Apologies to Mr. Gladwell for that last sentence.
One of the problems we face is that it’s so (too?) easy to create digital content. Rip a CD and you’ll have MP3s or WMAs, take photos and you’ll have JPEGs and possible RAW files too, send emails and you’ll likely store a copy of your sent email in some format or another, type up and send a letter and you have a new document to store, and all of that is presuming you are only using your computer for ‘everyday life’ tasks. If your work requires a computer Id guess that you are creating, probably, mega-bytes of brand spanking new digital content every single day (although you might not store it all on your own computer).
But what’s the big problem? As the cost of storage continues to drop, it’s now relatively inexpensive to have at least a Terabyte of easily accessed disk space in your home. I currently have around 850GB of space, spread across three drives (one of which is an external drive used for backup only) none of which are even remotely close to being full, although that’s mainly because I’ve not yet resumed my on-going CD conversion project.
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