Aaron Carpenter's blog

I got to thinking the other day where lots of my data is actually located and the truth of the matter is I don’t have a clue. I’m old enough to remember those massive floppy drives that ran the programs on those slate gray ancient Macs and it was understood that the programs existed on those disks. It was a tactile and physical sensation. One could hold it in their hands and feel the power.

Nowadays we scatter our data to the winds and put it all in the hands of strangers and for some reason it doesn’t really bother us at all. Have a Flickr account? Gmail? Bought space on a server? It’s all the same, really. The funny thing is years ago people would have laughed at your stupidity if you recommended storing your files on someone else’s computer in God-knows-where and roll their eyes, thinking your head was in the clouds.

And it is. Living in the “cloud” is all the rage these days. Despite the fact that hard drives are ubiquitous and completely affordable we can’t be bothered to keep all of it on our machines.  In this age of always-on Internet there’s no real harm in it, as we’ll always have access.

There is a shift here in culture that will make it difficult for digital immigrants to accept and that is that data is no longer bound by your own personal hardware constraints. If you grew up with no computer or started using one later in life you probably felt that the memory card in your hand was like a piece of film and it took some explaining that you really could reuse it. Of course, that is no longer the case.

Cloud computing is here to stay. The convenience factor cannot be overlooked, as being able to access your files from anywhere you have an internet connection and a browser is a powerful tool.