Have you ever lost information from a computer, camera, or even a mobile phone? You could have deleted it unintentionally, or the operating system could have crashed and burned. It’s happened to a good number of us.
For all the memory, the storage, the digital space that we have built for ourselves, with it has come the ease of loosing personal data. This could mean photos. It could mean journal entries. There are a host of personal creations, all contained within numerous digital spaces: personal computers, mobile phones, and servers (to name a few). The larger our cyber universe grows, the easier it becomes to loose the data we place there.
I’d like to coin my own digital axiom, an offspring to that of Moore’s Law; let’s call it Gant’s Law:
For every hard drive, memory card, integrated circuit, or microprocessor that we add to our electronic lives, the capacity of ease to loose our digitial history increases.
Two computers ago, and eight years past, my computer crashed. I used this computer for nearly five years and amassed a large amount of writing, digital photos, and calendar items. It was a lot of information (as you might imagine). I recycled that computer but not before I pulled out its hard drive. That hard drive is still in my closet, waiting for the day when I reclaim my data. I’m afraid to let it go, there is too much history on it.
Now, there is the assertion that he who has lost data is a fool for not backing up that data. No argument can be made against this. But I’d like to mention that Gant’s Law holds true even with back-ups; adding another device to insure a safekeeping of information is still adding to the size of one’s electronic life.
We are gods in a sense, creating a cyber universe that grows and expands using matter and energy much like the one where we live. We shape it when we need to. We improve it when we see an error. But sometimes we destroy (delete) it unintentionally and this causes us a bit of anguish.
The important thing to remember is that we are the creators after all. We are the gods. That which can be uncreated may be recreated. It only takes a bit of effort, time, and a single God-given ability: patience.
Copyright © Tyler Gant 2009
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