A virtual mess: Are you a secret digital hoarder?

David Cate at timesnews.net asks, "Is Dropbox the new commercial storage unit?"

Rasmus at Fast Company says Distributed Data Disorder includes social media with relationships scattered across multiple electronic outlets from Facebook to Twitter.

Simon Hill at Digital Trends encourages a change: "We need to throw off the shackles of digital hoarding before it weighs us down. Hard drives are cheap and they are capable of storing tons of useless files. Almost everyone can afford the digital equivalent of a many-roomed mansion. … The ease with which we can store digital files encourages us to stick them in a folder and forget about them rather than ask whether we need to keep them at all."

Hill refers to an interview on Big Think with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, director of the Information Policy Research Center, National University of Singapore. Mayer-Schönberger says: "You know, the bottom line is that for all of human history, we forgot most of what we experienced and we remembered only those things that we thought were really important. Sometimes we were right and we remembered the right things. Sometimes we were wrong and we remembered idiotic things. The importance is that the remembering was the exception and forgetting was the default, was the rule. And today, this has become reversed. Remembering today is the default and all of our digital tools and artifacts we use and forgetting, deleting, is costly and time consuming."

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