If you’re like me you’ve got photos, text, videos, and email spread all over the Internet. I’ve grown increasingly concerned about this situation. What if Flickr flickers? Or Google gurgles? What if WordPress gets squeezed? And another part of this problem is that it is increasingly difficult to manage all these online accounts. I have a password-protected document on my computer with pages of usernames and passwords. A final issue in my mind is that of privacy. When you sign over your photos, text and more to companies online you are handing over a lot of your privacy and fair use rights.
One way of looking at this positively is that electronic data is ephemeral anyway. Blog posts have a shelf life of a week. Facebook updates stick around for mere hours. Email messages more than a month old are seldom consulted again. So even if we lose all that stuff it’s not that big of a deal.
I’ve been considering consolidating all my data in a central place so that I can have better control over it. I think it would also save me some money. Right now I’m paying for Flickr Pro, WordPress upgrades, domain registrations. Put all those together and it’s maybe only $100 per year. But again remember we’re in the year 2109, have I been paying all those fees and keeping track of all those accounts for the last century? That’s a lot of money and hassle. Far better, I think, to buy server space and a domain and then manage all the content in a single location. Also, I can make a local backup and synchronize the contents locally and in “the cloud.”
The Internet is a tenuous, tipping Tower of Babel made not of cards but electrons representing zeroes and ones. The next 9/11 might not bring down a physical tower but knock out the Internet. A healthy dose of paranoia might be in order.
Here are some links:
Have you been reading Alan Jacobs (http://www.thenewatlantis.com/blog/text-patterns)? Sounds like his sort of concern.
Thanks for the link, Chaka. I’m going to check it out.