Today I thought I’d lost the majority of my delicious bookmarks. I panicked slightly and it made me think about how we take for granted that the sites we use on a regular basis, uploading, saving, organising, keeping track of our communication etc., that they are going to be there for ever.
I don’t soley rely on Flickr for storing my photos. I keep all of them on my external hard drive and on my computer as well. But it’s on Flickr that I organise them, pick out the best ones and create albums containing my gems.
Should Flickr close down then all that work and organisation goes lost. That’s what I thought had happened to all the little things I’ve come across on the internet and added to my delicious account. Luckily this wasn’t the case, but what if?
It’s quite common that things get wiped after an account has been inactive for a longer period of time, especially email accounts. Between my BSc and MSc I went travelling for 6 months and I remember being in Airlie beach, Australia, at an internet cafe looing in the sent folder of my hotmail account for an email that I’d, well sent. I’d taken it for granted that it’d still be there but it turned out that Hotmail only kept sent emails for a certain number of days and so the email I was looking for was gone. Equally, my student webmail account got closed during that 6 months break, even though I’d told them I was coming back. They’d sent an email informing me that the account would be closed in 30 days, but since I was out travelling I got this email too late and all my emails and contacts got wiped. I tried everything to get it back but they couldn’t help me.
It’s worth thinking about in this digital age where we often don’t think twice about the things we “save” on various sites and more importantly, we take it for granted that they’d be there forever. I, for one, can imagine that the day will come when I no longer check my facbook account on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean that I’d never want to access it again. It might merely be a break and a few years later I’d really value loggin on again having a peak into what’s happened lately in my facebook friends lives. But what if Facebook, by then, have decided that I’ve been inactive for too long? Or what if they, or some other sites we rely on, for whatever reason, all of a sudden would close down? Who looks after our digital life and interests and ensures it’s kept safe?
