Every MP3 download chips it away. Each round of family photos gnaws at the promise. Home movies, countless e-mails and piles of files causing clutter and chaos.
Technology’s vow of efficiency and order is beginning to decay–corrupted by consumption.
Personal computers–our jukeboxes, photo labs, accountants and film studios–are becoming the proverbial junk drawer, scattered with scads of must-have information. Devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players and digital video recorders overflow with often barely a byte of spare storage.
The ravenous nature of society coupled with the quest for convenience has spawned a nation of digital pack rats, eager to possess every gigabyte of media they can download and too greedy–or lazy–to let it go.
“Inevitably, as soon as I delete something, I need it the next week,” said Leslie Bottoms, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, who has kept as many as 18,000 e-mails on her computer. “I figure it saves the tree if I don’t have to print it out. I get quite attached to my e-mail. I have stuff from several years ago.”
One’s desk might be clean and tidy, but countless computer desktops have become chaotic.
“It’s like an infinite attic, and we’re filling it,” said Peter Lyman, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems.
Lyman is completing a study on personal media consumption and the choices people make regarding media. Among the findings: 90 percent of those surveyed have at least two e-mail addresses. Yet 50 percent decried problems with managing e-mail volume.
When thousands of songs, photos or documents can be tucked out of sight, the ability to determine what’s golden or garbage begins to blur.
As a result, efficiency–perhaps technology’s most endearing quality–vaporizes.
And our ability to self-edit these digital possessions may be suffering.
“We’re definitely pack rats, no question,” said Peter Shankman, chief executive officer of Geek Factory Inc., a New York City trendspotting firm that specializes in pop culture movements. “The 80GB drives have given us no reason to toss anything. You can have 40 pictures of your dog you might think are good, and you’ll never erase them.”
Cheap storage and software is certainly enabling consumers to horde countless files.
Gmail–Google’s e-mail service–offers 1,000 MB of free storage and promises that users will never have to delete an e-mail again. TiVo digital video recorders now offer as much as 140 hours of recording time for television programs. Apple boasts that one of its iPods can hold up to 10,000 songs.
With this type of media storage, why bother sweeping out electronic dust bunnies?
Persuading people to give up perceived-as-priceless files seems unlikely. Not surprisingly, there’s rapid development of organizational software, devices and services that aim to tame this information.
“I’m not sure people want to do a lot of housekeeping,” said Michael Markman, a developer and marketing specialist for Moxi, a new TiVo-like product that boasts the ability to choose and organize television programming, photos and music. “The good news is they won’t have to. Software will manage it for them.”
Still, some are looking to clean house.
Professional organizer Iszak is being contracted by executives to clean out and organize their work PCs. His clients include, of all people, IBM and Dell employees.
“Sometimes people do better with the physical, but doing it in the computer is a bit more abstract,” he said.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Michael Morgan (mnmorgan@tribune.com)
