BLOGSERVATIONS

As technology advances the amount of digital data we can store increases exponentially. Combine that with the various forms of data we are capable of receiving or producing with the myriad portable computer devices at our disposal and our hard drives become virtual attics full of shoeboxes with stored memories. But that’s okay, the technology will always keep up so it’s just a matter of buying more boxes and attic space.

It Began Innocently Enough
One of our worst digital hoarding problems has to be with pictures. In 1991 the Sony Mavica allowed us to take pictures and store them on a floppy disk. We could get about 6 to 20 pictures — low-res by today’s standards — on one disk depending on the resolution. However, like getting only 24 pictures per roll of film, we were limited by the storage capacity of the floppy disk, so digital wasn’t a distinct advantage then.

We used film cameras and collected our pictures in photo albums, storing the extras in a shoebox up in the attic. No problem, humans had been doing that since George Eastman gave us the Brownie Box Camera in 1900. Shoes came much early, so our original photo storage device was developed before hand.

Now — some 21 years after the Mavica, 112 years after our first snap shot camera, and who knows how many years after the first shoebox — we can fit thousands of pictures on one 8 gig SDHC Flash Memory Card, and we keep them all.

With film cameras we were more frugal. After flipping through our pics outside the Fotomat we threw the bad ones away, but now we take eighty-two pictures of everything because we can, and we don’t delete any of them, we just dump them all onto our home computers and go take more! The digital world is kind of invisible so the clutter isn’t immediately obvious, but in the real world we would need a bunch of shoeboxes to contain all of the pictures we take these days.

Not only do we hoard these digital photos on our home computers and portable drives, but many of us have duplicates of pictures uploaded to our Facebook profiles, Myspace, Flickr, PhotoBucket, and other social sharing sites. They all collect there too! We keep them and dupe them, but never want, or seem able, to delete any of them.

How about text messages? Why do I keep 200 texts from my fiancé on my Motorola DROID? Because I can of course, but also because I find it painfully hard to delete those precious conversations; like I would jinx something by deleting “I Love You,” or “Miss you hunny bunny.” That’s an example, she doesn’t really call me hunny bunny, I swear!

Is Hoarding Information a Problem?
Seriously though, many of us just can’t seem to part with the text messages or photos on our cell phones. Cell phones are the new shoebox we can carry around. Cards and letters, pictures; they are always with us. We can look at the photos or read the texts whenever we want to. Pictures become our phone’s main screen screen backdrop. Text messages remind us of days gone by, and allow us to relive those moments in memory. They are reminders.

There are people who find it near impossible to part with things in the physical world. They keep newspapers, books, garbage, toys, tools and other things, allowing the mess to just collect. They suffer from a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) called hoarding.

How many times have you selected an item for deletion but found you just couldn’t do it? You couldn’t send that memory away forever. Could this be a form of OCD hoarding? It’s healthy to do a little spring cleaning so to speak. Sometimes we need to weed through the junk and get rid of it, clean house a bit, keeping the most important events and memories. It’s easier for some than for others.

I mentioned that the photos and texts we keep remind us of things. To that end, are we dumbing ourselves down by relying on technology that allows us to keep all of this stuff? Maybe our memories are getting worse because we don’t use our brains as much.

One Solution to Digital Hoarding
My goal of this post is not to examine psychological disorders. Regardless of why we have to hold on to stuff, technology makes it easy to do, so why do we need to throw stuff away if we can just buy more storage space?

My answer to Digital Hoarding: Move it to “The Cloud!” How many times have you delayed deleting an item because you were sure you had backed it up to another drive but wanted to check… then forgot to check, so now it sits in two locations?

Cloud services exist to streamline our lives by putting our digital content (that we now hoard on our home computers) onto a cloud server and making it available to us on any device, from any location. If we move everything to the cloud we can just keep hoarding our data there! Who cares!? It’s like collecting all of our junk in one guys garage, then our house doesn’t look so bad!

Those of us with real psychological issues like true OCD need to seek help and address the situation, then begin cleaning up and move forward. The rest of us can continue to hoard in the digital domain. Rent some “cloud” service, or just keep buying more backup drives.