March 28, 2007
Email Pack Rats Rejoice!
“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives.”
-Yahoo! co-founder David Filo.
Yahoo’s announcement that they will offer unlimited disk space for email accounts plays right into the hands of a new breed of pack rat: the email server storage hog.
I’m not sure if cluttering up my inbox with one line replies, semi-interesting listserv messages, or even ongoing chains trying to figure out what to get my dad for his birthday qualifies as archiving my life. An archive implies something worth going back to later, or at least something that you suspect you might want to keep around.
I’m trying to envision a future sitting around with the wife, going through our old emails and remembering the glory days: “Oh remember this, honey, when we tried to go out to dinner with Stephen and his friends, but we couldn’t find a date that worked for everyone? Those were the days.” Nope, I just don’t see it. But enjoy your extra disk space, Yahoozers.
Edward McElvain, Project Manager
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Okay, sure. I see your point. There is bound to be a lot of garbage in boundless personal email.
But looking deeper, one could argue that archiving may be important *because* we don’t know what is going to be important in the future. There is a famous picture of a certain US president hugging a certain intern in a beret that was not that significant at the time that it was originally published. A formerly useless, banal artifact can take on a meaning after archiving that no one could have anticipated.
Philo-sophically (ha, ha) speaking, if you already know what’s going to be important to you in the future, what’s the point in living it?
Comment by Scott Lepich — May 23, 2007 @ 4:13 pm