While sitting in my living room with my two roommates, and best friends since high school, the discussion of hoarding came up. I should give you all some background to this discussion before getting into its relevance to the discussion of narrative in the digital age. I think it is safe to say that my friends and I are willing to timidly admit to having compulsive hoarding tendencies of our own. We all have our “memory boxes” in which we’ve saved notes, hall passes, pictures, prom
mementos (among other momentous occasions as well), and movie/concert tickets. Each of the items hoarded may have little to no significance to any other person, but to us, not having them would seem devastating. In fact, I just suggested the premise that I burn my friends box of notes, and she threatened my life. Just saying. These are the tangible items to which we attach memories and emotions, and not having these collections poses the threat that we may forget those things that we considered important in our past. In truth, it’s not just about forgetting. It’s a complex cornucopia of feelings that these items themselves are valuable, that to throw them away would be wasteful and looked down upon in some sense. If I were to clean out my memory box now, those things that I throw away I would be labeling unimportant and therefor I would be scorning those memories that shaped who I am now.
Now, moving on to the digital age implications of this discussion. I’m sure many of you have already made the connection and are thinking about your own overfull music folders, perhaps saved aol conversations, overflowing inboxes, and folders with every single writing assignment you’ve ever written. Certainly there are many individuals that crave a streamlined life, and are able to delete these digital memorabilia without hesitation. They’re the same people that hate clutter, knick knacks, and like Jeff Lewis designs (yes Bravo reference!). I am not one of those people. In the Digital Age, there is a whole new form of hoarding being birthed, and it’s reachings grow with the ever-expanding web of social networking sites.
I can remember the beginning days of internet, or at least the days when it began to infiltrate domestic life: the days of dial-up, and does anyone remember subprofile?? Yes, AOL defined my beginning web experiences. And there began my digital hoarding. It was a chance to actually save conversations, and not just those conversations that made it into notes, but actual conversations (pages and pages long) of back and forth dialogue. I’m not sure that outside of a courtroom with a stenographer conversations were actually being saved prior to this. All I know is that I wanted to save every conversation. What did that mean? Well, first it meant that I left my desktop on 24 hours a day and no one was allowed to close out the dialogue boxes in AIM. Later on, AIM gave the option to autosave conversations, but before that, I had dialogue boxes with days, weeks, maybe even months of conversations able to be scrolled through, all in one continuous page. Now multiply that times the number of friends I was carrying on conversations with. Now multiply that by the 10 years I have used aol (though less since Facebook came about, but imagine Facebook as an extension of AOL). Most of these conversations are saved in a folder, which I rarely traverse into, but would never delete. This folder has been transplanted into each new computer, and I can’t even remember how many computers it’s been. Yet the folder lives on. Why do I save all of these things! I don’t know, but I can. And I will.
A few months ago, my computer crashed, and I was faced with the possibility that all of my documents, music, and pictures may be gone forever. To this possibility I cried out, “But that’s my life!” Although it sounds melodramatic, in a sense, that laptop was the digital version of my memory box. In a narrative sense, if you could sort through that hoard, you could tell the story of my life. Luckily, I was able to save everything from it, and I invested several hours after uploading its entire contents to Google Documents. I am now the proud owner of 80 GB space in the Google servers, and as long as the Google server doesn’t crash, my digital hoard will be safe forever.
But how crazy is it that I have all of this digital stuff, that could basically act as my autobiography? I’ve never really thought about it, but it’s a phenomenon singular to the digital generation. It also makes me wonder-- if there was a visual representation for my digital hoard, would it look like TLC’s Buried Alive? Am I too attached to my digital hoard? Is that even possible? These are just some questions to throw out as a wrap up to my blog because what’s better than open-ended questions to say “I don’t really know how to sum up all of these ideas, but this blog is starting to sound like rambling.” :-P
mementos (among other momentous occasions as well), and movie/concert tickets. Each of the items hoarded may have little to no significance to any other person, but to us, not having them would seem devastating. In fact, I just suggested the premise that I burn my friends box of notes, and she threatened my life. Just saying. These are the tangible items to which we attach memories and emotions, and not having these collections poses the threat that we may forget those things that we considered important in our past. In truth, it’s not just about forgetting. It’s a complex cornucopia of feelings that these items themselves are valuable, that to throw them away would be wasteful and looked down upon in some sense. If I were to clean out my memory box now, those things that I throw away I would be labeling unimportant and therefor I would be scorning those memories that shaped who I am now.
Now, moving on to the digital age implications of this discussion. I’m sure many of you have already made the connection and are thinking about your own overfull music folders, perhaps saved aol conversations, overflowing inboxes, and folders with every single writing assignment you’ve ever written. Certainly there are many individuals that crave a streamlined life, and are able to delete these digital memorabilia without hesitation. They’re the same people that hate clutter, knick knacks, and like Jeff Lewis designs (yes Bravo reference!). I am not one of those people. In the Digital Age, there is a whole new form of hoarding being birthed, and it’s reachings grow with the ever-expanding web of social networking sites.
I can remember the beginning days of internet, or at least the days when it began to infiltrate domestic life: the days of dial-up, and does anyone remember subprofile?? Yes, AOL defined my beginning web experiences. And there began my digital hoarding. It was a chance to actually save conversations, and not just those conversations that made it into notes, but actual conversations (pages and pages long) of back and forth dialogue. I’m not sure that outside of a courtroom with a stenographer conversations were actually being saved prior to this. All I know is that I wanted to save every conversation. What did that mean? Well, first it meant that I left my desktop on 24 hours a day and no one was allowed to close out the dialogue boxes in AIM. Later on, AIM gave the option to autosave conversations, but before that, I had dialogue boxes with days, weeks, maybe even months of conversations able to be scrolled through, all in one continuous page. Now multiply that times the number of friends I was carrying on conversations with. Now multiply that by the 10 years I have used aol (though less since Facebook came about, but imagine Facebook as an extension of AOL). Most of these conversations are saved in a folder, which I rarely traverse into, but would never delete. This folder has been transplanted into each new computer, and I can’t even remember how many computers it’s been. Yet the folder lives on. Why do I save all of these things! I don’t know, but I can. And I will.
A few months ago, my computer crashed, and I was faced with the possibility that all of my documents, music, and pictures may be gone forever. To this possibility I cried out, “But that’s my life!” Although it sounds melodramatic, in a sense, that laptop was the digital version of my memory box. In a narrative sense, if you could sort through that hoard, you could tell the story of my life. Luckily, I was able to save everything from it, and I invested several hours after uploading its entire contents to Google Documents. I am now the proud owner of 80 GB space in the Google servers, and as long as the Google server doesn’t crash, my digital hoard will be safe forever.
But how crazy is it that I have all of this digital stuff, that could basically act as my autobiography? I’ve never really thought about it, but it’s a phenomenon singular to the digital generation. It also makes me wonder-- if there was a visual representation for my digital hoard, would it look like TLC’s Buried Alive? Am I too attached to my digital hoard? Is that even possible? These are just some questions to throw out as a wrap up to my blog because what’s better than open-ended questions to say “I don’t really know how to sum up all of these ideas, but this blog is starting to sound like rambling.” :-P
I think all of us have a little bit of a digital hoarder inside us. We may not want to admit it, but I think we do. I've had a folder on my computer(s) that has existed for at least 6 years; it's been transferred from my old computer to my new one and now, it's even on my laptop. It's where I keep my pictures, screenshots and documents of certain things that I wanted to save and remember. So, I can relate to you on that. Also, don't worry about rambling; I'm incredibly guilty of that. :P
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I'm curious as to what you think about this: do you think, in a sense, academia has become a digital hoarder? Academics have an array of databases to use to back up journals, essays and books. It's great to have access to this, but why do you think this has come around? How does it relate back to us as people?
Also, I'm curious as to what you have to say regarding our readings thus far. It'd be nice to hear another opinion. :)
I'm guilty of being a digital hoarder. I have a hotmail account with years of undeleted, unsorted messages in the inbox. I think it's part of the progression of digital media. Once upon a time, people bought computers with hard drives that were easily filled. People had email accounts with limited storage. You used to have to choose carefully what you wanted to save, and what got cut. I wonder if the age of larger hard drives, bigger ipods, and inconceivably large ammounts of storage hasn't destroyed our ability to choose/distinguish between what we have and what we want to keep. Now the answer to "what would you like to keep?" is the simple "all of it."
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