When Everything is Stored, Everything is Lost

It seems like the more we digitize of or life, the less we access it.

I went to some friends a week ago. One family visiting another. They just moved to a new place and did a housewarming party. We sat there and they talked about the trips they did before their boy was born, and how they had the time to travel the world a couple of years because they married late. My wife asked to see photos of these trips, and then a photo album was taken out and was passed around for us to see.

It was an interesting and quaint experience – looking at a photo album – especially when this couple are arguing for years now if they need to develop their digital photos and put analog prints of them into physical albums or not – the notion being that without the physical album – nobody watches them.

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I read the The Innovator's Solution lately. In it, the authors give Kodak as an example of a company being disrupted because it didn't understand the "job to be done" and align itself accordingly. Their view? People want to take photos of their experiences a lot more than watch them later, so improvements in image quality from a certain point in time is useless to most.

The same goes for Flickr and the rest of the online tools that enable putting an order to images – very little use of them once Dropbox added automatic photo upload for smartphones; and Instagram focused on instant sharing.

I guess it again talks about the fact that we rather store than retrieve.

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Facebook and Twitter. We overshare stuff on them, but do we really look back to the past to see what's there? Can we do it easily at all? How many of us even care?

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WebRTC enables doing the same to voice. There's an interesting article in the New York Times about what's lost when everything is recorded. It deals a lot with meta data and analytics and can now be used on the recordings.

The most essential part? If we record everything, do we bother to remember anything? Will we be putting less emphasis on remembering simply because it is stored somewhere? Same as no one ever remembers a phone number anymore.