Turtles-Paradise

I’ve gotten rid of a lot of items since I started the Great De-Cluttering Project. The gameboy is gone, a large number of books, the second iPod. Most of the surfaces in my house are a lot clearer. But then, in the middle of archiving all the data from my pile of CD’s, I ran into a problem.

Namely, a space problem. I have a 120gb external harddrive – and it’s full. That’s a lot of data. The problem is, most of it is important – old artwork files, photographs, writing, music, and web-design work. Stuff I want to keep. Memories of who I used to be, old friends, and long journeys to places that changed me.

But, I have no space. I have the virtual equivalent of an overflowing house, and a moving van parked outside. So what do I do?

• I could upgrade. I could buy a 1tb hard-drive for about £65, and never run out of space again (until I do)
• or, I could delete stuff. I could decide that actually, 13gb of music – that’s 2919 songs, or 8 solid days of non-repeating music – is overkill. Especially when I haven’t listened to over 70% of them in years. I could go through the photographs, keep the ones that have special meaning, and delete the thousands of generic and fuzzy shots of flowers, clouds, and people’s backs. I could pare the artwork down to the few pieces I am actually proud of, and dump the experiments with software and colour.

It’s easy to ignore digital clutter. It doesn’t take up physical space in our house and lives – we can truly forget it’s even there. But it is still clutter. You end up losing the few important things in a sea of junk.

Digital clutter is insidious. It’s too easy to download a free song, a free e-book, to sign up to another free RSS feed, another newsletter, and to shove all your half-finished projects onto another hard-drive. After-all, virtual space is endless, right?

Not quite. Apparently, by 2020, we’ll have 35 zettabytes of data globally, and will be struggling to find the room to store it all. The question, of course, is how much of that data is actually worth keeping. In all the frantic digital activity of the last couple of years, as everyone turns to content creation and content sharing, as people get used to tweeting what they had for dinner and facebooking every interaction – will we have enough space to keep it all backed-up? Will there be huge warehouses, filled with gigantic hard-drives, all backing up each trivial comment ‘just in case’?

Don’t get me wrong. That everyone has a cheap and convenient outlet for their creative sides is amazing. That we have leapt into the ‘age of information’ is something to be impressed by, not scared of. But we should all try and make sure that the data we produce isn’t just noise, but is actually meaningful in some way.

Otherwise all the great ideas, the amazing artwork that moves us to tears, the songs that kept us alive through puberty, the writing that opened new doorways in our minds – these will be buried beneath a hundred you-tube videos of someone falling downstairs, a thousand spurious e-books full of fluff and mis-information, and a million doodles of stick-men.

Which isn’t to say that stick-men can’t be genius.