我保存了所有照片和文档，但我真的需要它们吗？
2024-08-03 07:05阅读：
我一直有保存个人照片和短信等数据的习惯。我曾为恢复一部2010年老旧黑莓手机中的数据跑去纽约市多家手机店寻求帮助，为的就是找回中学时的短信。如今，我每月花约3美元买了云端服务，手机里所有信息都上传云端，我也喜欢时不时上云端翻出过去的照片和短信等内容“怀旧”感叹。或许并非每个人都像我这样保存所有照片和短信或保留所有数字记忆，不过，我的个人数字生活癖好确实引申出了很有趣的问题：数字时代，每个人该如何对待自己一路走来所留下的数字记忆？
我在云端存储的个人数据总共有200多GB，其中包括1.6万张照片、历时8年的电子邮件以及44GB的苹果手机短信。我认为，今后肯定还会不断生成和存储更多个人数据，估计还得花钱买更多云端存储空间。当代人现在平均每天生成8MB的上网数据，而10年前这一数字为2MB。此外，当代美国人平均每人拥有500GB的网上存储空间。海量个人数据也需要越来越多的存储空间，存储空间的成本和能耗也在不断提升。有统计显示，当下互联网和数字产业的年排放量已与航空产业相当。
保存多年个人数据的习惯被一些专家称为“数据囤积”。专家说，积累过多数字材料会让人感到压力和焦虑。确实，作为“数据囤积者”，我把自己的短信、照片都保存下来，到底有没有用呢？保存这些数据的一个重要原因是对过去的“好奇”。有时我可能会回想，当年大学刚毕业时自己和好朋友聊了些什么？对未来有何期许？前男友是说了什么才跟自己正式开始交往拍拖的？俩人又是因为什么开始闹别扭最后又分手了？等等。要解答这些好奇的疑问，我就需要上云端去翻看过去的记录。
不过，我保存所有这些数据的主要原因是一种对可能失去过往记忆的焦虑。我承认，如果丢失了过去这些短信交流记录，那就等于丢失了自己过往生活的“证据”，
也失去了自己与他人交流的“证据”。再者，如果身边有人逝去，如果丢掉了当年跟逝者生前的短信交流记录，那就真的再也找不到逝者存在的痕迹了。
有趣的是，我特别看重数字记忆，但对现实生活中实体物件的保存却并不上心。事实上，对那些老旧又用不着的东西，我的习惯是想都不想直接丢弃。不知道这种重数字记忆而轻实体物件的习惯在其他人身上是否多见？
我并不是技术玩家，没有云端的时候曾学着网络论坛上介绍的方法尝试使用软件工具自行搞个人数据备份，结果搞得自己相当狼狈效果还不好。大多数人其实跟我一样，对数据和云端等技术活儿都不太行。
作为少数研究个人数据存储问题的专家之一，英国诺森比亚大学心理学教授利兹·希伦斯说，大多数人都不了解到底该怎么入手管理大量个人数据，包括弄不清一些基本的技术问题。例如，有的人不知道数据到底是存在手机上还是云端上，还有人不清楚清理数据时数据是被彻底删除了、还是在云端什么地方仍留有备份，等等。
档案专家玛格·诺特称，现在有越来越多的私人客户找上门来，请她帮忙存储个人数字资料，包括记录“日常历史和重要时刻”的各种短信。诺特说，数字时代这些短信所起到的作用就好比当年的实体书信一样，记录着岁月流逝过程中人际关系的演变。
诺特介绍说，目前就机构而言，已经有很好的数字归档解决方案来存储机构数据，但像照片、电邮、短信这样的个人数据归档保存，目前还没有好用的专门工具。换言之，数据存档工具还没有从机构用户渗透到个人用户，但相信未来肯定会有个人工具出现。
把起居环境打理得干净不容易，在数字时代要让自己的数字生活处理得井井有条也并非易事。
I save all my texts and photos. But do I really need
them?
Every day, I generate more digital stuff my older self might like
to look back on – but there’s no way to manage it all
Adrian Horton
Afew years ago, I faced an unexpected conundrum: there were only a
handful of decent phone repair stores in New York, and even fewer
willing and able to work on a 2010 Blackberry. There was exactly no
one sympathetic to my plight, which was that I had to get my broken
and long-out-of-service phone working again, because it held my
high school text messages that was crucial evidence of my
life.
For one brief, shining moment, the Blackberry had actually turned
on. I scrolled through my long-lost inbox, looking for little
forgotten treasures: written confirmation of teenage heartbreak,
maybe, or records of lust, ennui, thrill, my eating disorder. But I
didn’t find much. Mostly, I texted about homework.
I never got it working again. This felt like a crisis, albeit a
private and narcissistic one. The idea that this trove of material
– evidence of how I felt, how I communicated, how my friends talked
in the height of adolescence – was stuck on a broken machine seemed
like a tragedy.
That particular sadness has faded over time. But my digital
footprint has only snowballed. Every single day, I generate more
and more stuff that my older self might theoretically like to look
back on: reams of text messages – far more than the average 75
exchanged per day – as well as photos, videos, emails, social media
likes and metadata of my million Google searches. There are plenty
of stupid group chat memes or “be there in 5” texts, as well as the
final messages my grandmother sent me and the whole arc of a
long-distance relationship that recently ended.
I’ve learned from my error with the Blackberry. Instead of relying
on small devices designed to become obsolete, I now pay for cloud
services to keep everything in a vast, vaporous, overwhelming pile.
For $2.99 per month, they preserve my 200+ GB digital attics –
including 16,000 photos, eight years of Gmails and a treasured 44GB
of iMessages sent and received after I toggled my iPhone settings
to “never delete” in 2017.
I don’t have this compulsion to save in the physical realm, where I
regularly purge outdated, irrelevant items with little thought. But
I am sentimental, and identify with what experts call “digital
hoarding” – accumulating excess digital material to the point of
causing stress and anxiety.
Even with a less extreme approach, your digital trail is likely
still massive, diffuse, haphazard and accessible only at the whims
of tech companies. According to experts, we each generate roughly
8MB of data online every day, compared to 2MB a decade ago. The
average American owns about 500GB of storage, including social
media usage, expanding amid the gargantuan 328.77 million terabytes
of new data generated every day.
Our digital storage lockers are only getting bigger, more expensive
and worse for the planet – the internet and digital industry
produces the same emissions annually as aviation. That’s not to
mention the emotional toll of managing your cloud-storage hell and
storage limits. There are increasing calls from data storage
experts and financially stressed journalists for us to embark on
digital spring cleanings – to toss out duplicate photos as you
would old going-out tops.
Most people, myself included, have a porous and under-studied
relationship with phones and the cloud. Dr Liz Sillence, a
psychology professor at Northumbria University and one of the few
researchers who has examined personal digital data storage, has
found that most people don’t even know where to begin with their
data. “Do I really own it? Is it on the cloud? If I delete
everything from my device will it still be there somewhere? Should
I get extra backups if I don’t trust it? It just adds to the data
problem,” she said.
I know the confusion. I am neither a tech expert nor particularly
organized – as with money, I prefer to not think about my data
storage, as long as it’s there and accessible. Occasionally, I’ll
get a rush of energy to move my data off-cloud, in very DIY,
un-savvy ways, such as copying every Facebook message between my
best friend and me from when we were 16 and pasting them into a
Word document. I get easily stymied by tech jargon and the
multi-step procedures recommended on various Reddit boards full of
people like me, scared to lose remnants of themselves or the
digital remains of a loved one.
One Christmas, my sister gifted me a subscription to iMazing, one
of several services that will back up your iPhone and export
iMessages into easy-to-read PDF files. But after multiple attempts
and countless frustrated hours, I’ve given up, because I don’t have
enough storage on my 2017 MacBook. For months, I dealt with my
phone’s low memory by manually deleting photos from my texts. Then,
I simply bought a new phone, rather than risk accidentally deleting
something from the cloud.
Margot Note, an archivist, said she has more and more private
clients looking to preserve digital troves, especially text message
archives that capture “everyday history and significant moments”.
As with physical letters, “you see how relationships change over
time”, she said.
Some of this urge to preserve is curiosity. What were my best
friend and I talking about in 2018, when we were fresh out of
college, full of energy and on opposite sides of the world? How
exactly did my ex indicate to me that we were more than friends,
and when did it start falling apart?
But the predominant feeling is anxiety. If I lost my texts again, I
would lose evidence of me and my people. I’d lose the few things I
could hold on to after a loved one’s death – their voice, their
evolution over time, their specific tone with me. I wanted to
protect, as the writer Sarah Manguso said of her diary in her book
Ongoingness, “my defense against waking up at the end of my life
and realizing I’d missed it”.
“The very thought of data can actually make you feel anxious
because you know you’re not on top of it. It feels quite
overwhelming,” said Sillence. “Anxiety is a big barrier to really
engaging with restructuring and decluttering your digital
data.”
There are also risks if you do engage with it. In her book The End
of Forgetting: Growing Up With Social Media, culture and media
studies scholar Kate Eichhorn argued that the internet’s ability to
keep us a click away from the past damages our ability to form
adult identities, grow and mature. “There’s something at risk when
anything can come back into your life,” she told me. “I don’t think
we totally understand yet what the psychological impact of that
will be.”
On the sporadic occasions that I do dive into my 44GB trove of
texts, I usually emerge feeling drunk – on information, on longing
for the past, on the stupefying forward march of time. I also feel
struck by the fallibility of memory, as the record doesn’t always
align with my rose-tinted view of history. These texts aren’t
actually my recollections, they’re fragments of experience frozen
in time. What harm is there in forgetting them? What do I really
get by looking back?
Both Eichhorn and Sillence are skeptical of our need for all this
digital stuff. We’re constantly accumulating data, said Eichhorn.
“Is that an archive? Or does that fall into another secret socially
acceptable form of hoarding?” Sillence suggests pruning one’s cloud
could be ritualistic, like filing taxes: “Review the day’s photos
and just delete the ones that you know are never going to see the
light again.”
I like the idea of being more ruthless. I could start to be
intentional about my digital archive. I could prune and delete. I
could dump data into a so-called “second-brain app” designed as
external memory for everything from texts to to-do lists. But Note,
the archivist, assured me that I was not an idiot for failing to
find a good way to organize my digital attic; as of now, there
isn’t one. For institutions, there are powerful preservation
solutions, “but it requires a lot of labor and a lot of resources”,
she said. “It just hasn’t trickled down to personal digital
archiving. I think eventually it will, but right now there’s not
some solution out there that exists that people just aren’t aware
of.”
So most likely, I will just wait until my storage clouds fill up
before making any decisions – and probably pay for another gigabyte
or two. My cloud storage hums quietly in the background: easy to
kick down the road, present but out of mind. Like with my old
Blackberry, tucked in a desk drawer, I feel less and less compelled
to ever go back to it, but it’s nice to know that it’s there.
