Storage is cheap, right? Back when I started using computers there were 320 kilobyte hard plate magnetic disks. Later I was shocked by the Atari ST having a megabyte of RAM (although I suppose I didn’t give it much thought at the time - I was only eight, after all). When I got my first IBM clone, a Hyundai box with a Pentium chip, back in 1996, it had 8 megs of RAM and 800 megs of hard disk space. It had a CD-ROM drive too.
The guy at the computer store claimed I’d never be able to fill the 800 megs. Sometimes when I see that guy today I laugh a bit, deep inside. Storage is cheap, right?
So far this year I’ve lost four gigabytes worth of memory sticks. Another two gigs have been misplaced, but I’m fairly sure I left it plugged into Maria’s computer at the party I was at the other day.
Nowadays we don’t actually need to delete anything. Storage is so cheap we should be able to keep perfect records of everything that transpires in our lives. Sure, data organization is still a bitch, one that Google has nailed pretty well for any identifiable data, but still something a lot of people waste a lot of time on. Do I stick this file in /home/spm or /var? I have /files for relatively large files of a static nature - stuff I don’t change. Stuff like leeched PDFs, BoingBoing TV shows, downloaded TED talks. Stuff I don’t have any reason to change.
Anyway. My current cell phone used to be pretty suave. Now I look at it with moderate disdain: I just realized how many megabytes of data I must have deleted from it. Emptying the text message inbox. Sent items too.
I also just realized that the phone offers no features for organizing such items. The phone book is of limited use. There isn’t message threading, I can’t color code by sender. I can’t star important items. Sure I can push entries into different folders, but that’s of limited use: the phone only offers a fixed set of folders, predefined.
Cell phones have lagged severely behind when it comes to data retention. Fifty years from now the amount of available data from the text-messaging period will be little enough to trivialize the role of communications in our time. What will historians of the future think teenagers did with themselves back when the digital age was coming to fruition?
Cell phone companies haven’t made it easy for people to crypt their stuff. There aren’t very good privacy features, there’s no strong public key stuff bundled. And the memory gets filled up quick. Unreplenishable, scarce.
Does it matter at all? I don’t know. Perhaps I should just press ‘Delete all’ like everybody else and not worry about future history. But that wouldn’t really be my style, now, would it?
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