One of my gripes with digital storage becoming “THE” storage format, especially for audio and photography, is that while it takes much less in terms of resources to create, it’s also criminally easy to delete.

I used to save all my answering machine tapes. A couple of years ago, I found a box full of them and listened to them. I heard much younger versions of my own voice, voices of family members and friends long dead, and voices of people I’d forgotten about entirely, discussing events that I’d forgotten about entirely.

At the time they were made, those recordings didn’t matter very much at all; they were just daily trivialities. Had digital answering machines or voicemail existed at the time, those messages would probably have been erased as soon as they were listened to the first time. The same goes for photographs and snapshots. It’s too easy to just delete the “unworthy” images 10 seconds after you take them with no remorse whatsoever, no real sense of waste to act as a psychological barrier to wanton abandonment.

Sometimes, things don’t reveal their true value until much later, and in some ways digital storage technology seems to encourage short-term thinking.