For digital hoarders, when hard drives crash -- and people lose their personal data -- it's devastating in the same way that losing a family photo album is. The practical value of these things is to stimulate memories; an old email or photograph is a reminder of how we felt at a different time in our lives. When they're gone, it's as though part of our own memories are gone too.Includes links to the recent NYTimes article on compulsive hoarders as well as some interesting projects on personal masses of data.
I've found, personally, that I'm rapidly running out of hard drive space, even though I keep purchasing new multi-gig drives. I'm not in the terrabyte range yet, but I have something like 500 gigs, about 80% full. I'm forcing myself to do things like archive digitized video from a couple of research projects, and convert AIFF interview files to mp3 to save space.
This is not a Web phenomenon, but more about information in general (at least for me). I wrote about this as early as 1989, in conference paper called "Anarchy and Hypertext." The ability to move quickly to more information, coupled with the fact that there's no such thing as the "ultimate" answer--that would be death--engenders the need to keep moving. And although history is never completely recoverable, I have the sense that I can somehow keep a handle on my past by keeping it stored on my hard drive.
Posted by johndan at January 19, 2004 02:44 PM
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