A Digital Lifestyle?
18 Jun
It has become the norm for us to digitize our lives and this is having a profound effect on our lifestyles. Those of us who grew up during the transitional period and more aware of this than most. I actually remember a time before mobile phones, digital cameras/music storage and the Internet. I also remember a time before mobile broadband when being on the internet meant a huge phone bill and the phone line being engaged for hours at a time. For the next generation this may be unthinkable but we were there and we saw phones the size of bricks and dial-up connections.
Previously photographs, videos and racks of CDs where found cluttering up living rooms around the country but digital storage is now taking over. Some hard drive companies are referring to “terabyte lifestyles” in an attempt to define the need for storage (You can just picture the look on the little Marketing types face’s when they came up with that one can’t you?).
All this constant collecting and documenting is The Fear. Anyone who has lost a year’s worth of photos or a great collection of obscure hard to find albums will understand that moment of panic when your computer will not turn on (hint: plug). The Fear leads us to backup, backup our backups and use online file storage and backup software.
The result of all this technological development is that physical copies are becoming less popular. This is affecting record companies in a big way as we know. Netflix has recently said that they only expect their mail-order DVD rental service to be needed for the next 5 years after which time downloads will take over. Does this mean that Ikea will have to sell digital storage rather then CD racks? Will archaeologists in the distant future be able to learn all about us by digging up a USB stick, or will they not have the necessary drivers?
Jack Schofield wrote an article about ‘Lifecaching’ in 2004 which seems to become more relevant as the years pass. He described the four ways in which recording our lives were (and are) becoming easier and easier.
First, new devices such as camera phones and digital recorders have made it much easier to record your life. Second, the use of digital media has allowed all the different types of record to be combined instead of stored separately. Third, the cost of disk storage has fallen to the point where many PC users can afford the terabyte or two of storage needed to keep everything. Finally, the internet has made it easy to share the results.
The advances in technology which Scholfield noted have lead to ‘Lifecaching’ or ‘Lifecasting’ becoming a real phenomena. Internet celebrities/attention seekers such as IJustine record their lives via blogs, live video streams and services such as Flickr and Twitte. Pay as you go mobile broadband makes it much easier for people to get connected, particularly those without a phone line. Advances in mobile connections have lead to the rest of us become more likely to record our everyday lives via photography and video.
The increased ease of blogging allows us to become more comfortable with sharing our offline life with our online ‘friends’. All the information we release is stored for posterity, to be viewed by whoever wishes (in the case of public blogs at least). Imagine if you could read your parents blog from when they were young, would you want to?
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