Another short one. Again in the service of shorter attention spans and quicker responses.
Charlie Wurzel’s recent rumination on abundant personal digital storage and the near endless scroll of our digital photo libraries on our smartphones builds on a lot of the stories of the past decade or so about the ‘effect’ we are noticing as we reach near ubiquitous computing in our lives is a good read. Ubiquitous storage is starting to shape our memories and narratives in way that, in old world cyborg way. We are being augmented and changed in the process. Wurzel writes,
“Having instantaneous access to tens of thousands of moments in my life doesn’t destroy my sense of self, but it alters how I formulate the narrative of my last decade. For example, there’s a weird patch from January to May 2015 where my photos never synced up to the cloud. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this period now seems less relevant in my actual memory. Similarly, I was foolish and didn’t upload my high-school, college, and pre-2013 photos, most of them digital, to the cloud.”