The migration of our lives into the Cloud has accelerated lately, and it is not at all to the detriment of our physical experiences. We need simplicity, in order to face a complex world, and certainly to me this world appears to getting really complex. The unified access to what concerns us, what interests us, and what we actually do day after day, which is offered by the Internet, and the various services popping up there, is a great help, that more and more people are discovering. As the number of people using the Internet and the services increases, it won’t sound strange anymore for people to send a url to a friend who wants to see a photo of the kids growing up, or a movie of a vacation spot, and so on.
Image by ximenatapia
What are the consequences of the digitization of our data? How does the local storage that we used to own as our only solution for preserving digital memories, avoid becoming a puzzle for the industrial archeologists of the future, instead of a trusted safe for us and our children?
I use a lot of local storage, at more than a Terabyte in my home currently, and certainly more in my companies, and I also spread data out in the services that I use. For photos, videos, documents, slideshows, and so on, including of course the stream of consciousness of contemporary microblogging tools of one type or another. So much so that somebody remarked that I am brain downloading. Which is, brain downloading, or brain dumping, somewhat the point really here. Since we do have this strong belief in the continuity of our identity, falsified day by day through our conversations where different accounts of the same events, forgetful memories, and just plain decadence, we jump to the opportunity of recording our feelings, thoughts, actions, and possessions.
And once the brain is dumped, what can you do with it? How do you treat it, what rights does it have, or what rights do you have on it?
There are a lot of things to talk about, and that is what we are going to do tomorrow at ‘Living In The Cloud“, an aperitivo that I organized tomorrow at 6PM. Please come along, and make yourself comfortable!