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I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value. In my opinion, it d

• incongruity 13y ago
  Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in love with her all over again. And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that in fact, those old conversations do matter, to me, often in unpredictable ways. Your mileage may well vary, but I'd be truly sad if I lost those bits of history. Moreover, I wish I had access to that sort of an archive from my parents or grandparents... So maybe it'll be interesting to my kids. Maybe not. But the thing is, I don't know what's really going to matter and when disk space (on this scale especially) is a so cheap, it seems foolish not to save it.
  • privong 13y ago
    > And I fall income with her all over again. Glorious, glorious (auto-correct) typos! :)
    • deleted 13y ago
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  • JunkDNA 13y ago
    Agree with this completely. My father died when I was 23. Being a digital packrat, I have every personal email I've ever sent or received. He wrote me quite regularly throughout college and I have all of those emails. All the life lessons and little bits of encouragement. My kids will never know their grandpa, but someday maybe we can share these together and they can learn a bit more about the kind of man he was in his own words, without my filter. They might also like some of the historically interesting ones like: "Mike, check out this new store: http://www.amazon.com http://www.amazon.com I think it's going to be popular. --Dad"
    • elwell 13y ago
      Very good point.
    • foobarian 13y ago
      People may or may not tend to hoarding stuff. For those who do, though, hoarding bits sure is a lot easier than hoarding physical possessions.
      • tunap 13y ago
        That is one of the points from a book I read recently. His tech advice other than digital archiving was questionable, but all in all, a good read: http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Minimalist-Life/dp/1449556825 http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Minimalist-Life/dp/144955...
  • sliverstorm 13y ago
    when disk space (on this scale especially) is a so cheap, it seems foolish not to save it. This is the critical part for me. I delete the crap because it makes searching harder, but I currently spend $0.01/month backing up every email I've ever exchanged with my loved ones. Maybe I'll never need them, but at $1.20/decade, why would I not stash them? (It is, of course, all automated)
• superuser2 13y ago
  Most of my texts and facebook messages are about organizing things and referencing them saves me tremendous hassle on a regular basis.
• cbr 13y ago
  This assumes you never talk about anything that actually matters. Having personal relationships and having fun are important, and technology can get in the way when overused, but if your conversations all have no lasting value you're missing out.
• jayd3e 13y ago
  Yeah I totally agree, tbh I actually thought that article was a satire when I started reading it.
• IgorPartola 13y ago
  Until you need to look up that link for the mock ups for that client from 14 months ago, or that weird picture of your niece to bring to her birthday 7 years later. The thing is that it costs nothing to keep this stuff. Throwing it out is a ritualistic digital seppuku. If you do it it is not for practical but for idealistic reasons. The practical thing is to save them and never look at them.
  • deleted 13y ago
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    • IgorPartola 13y ago
      Nothing like that. You might be an idealist if you preach that others do not back up their very likely important data because philosophically it will inflate their egos and aren't we all so small in this universe? I don't care if you don't do it, and I don't care if someone follows your advice. I am simply saying that your advice is not pragmatic.
• aaronem 13y ago
  > I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. You must be a delightful dinner companion. Fine, that's a cavil. This is not: Disk is cheap. My time is precious. It's a lot quicker and easier to just dump everything into a big greppable bucket, on the off-chance that five or ten years from now I might need to fish something out of it, than to spend hours or even minutes picking and choosing. Of course, excepting a reimage after disk failure, the odds that I'll ever actually need to pull something out of my backups are low -- but if the dice ever come up snake eyes, I'll certainly be able to retrieve whatever it is I'm after, while doing things your way has the same low-but-nonzero chance of needing to go fishing, plus a nonzero chance of not being able to retrieve whatever it is because you didn't think it was worth backing up. You present your attitude toward backups as originating in a need to suppress what must be an extraordinary susceptibility to a swelled head. May I suggest your efforts in that area are perhaps slightly less complete than you fancy them to be? But that's your problem to address, and of course you're free to take whatever chance you please, and waste however much time suits you, in pursuit of that admirable end. Me, I'll just keep shoveling everything into a big cheap bucket, on the off-chance I'll need to fish something out later on.
  • darklajid 13y ago
    I feel your first sentence is unnecessary and more a meme than a reasonable answer. Plus, people might consider NOT playing with your phone during dinner a really delightful thing. (My wife would be proud of me mentioning this, not that I tend to be that polite most of the time..)
    • gaius 13y ago
      You can play a game: everyone puts their phone in the middle of the table, the first person to pick theirs up during the meal pays the bill for the entire table (or split it if no-one does). There is another variant on this game that can be played with a goldfish bowl...
      • philwelch 13y ago
        I'm glad no one I know plays this childish game, speaking as someone who is occasionally on call, lives under the conscious commitment to always pick up the phone when my wife calls, or maybe just likes to check the time every so often.
• watwut 13y ago
  " I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. " If we are talking about something, (as opposed to just chatting around) I prefer when people look up facts they are unsure about. Especially if the alternative is guessing out of what they vaguely remember.
• unfamiliar 13y ago
  Do you feel the same way about the process of saving old letters from people? Because that practice has been going on for centuries.
• veidr 13y ago
  So like a hundred years ago you would be saying, "Upon perusing my letters received via post, I always immediately incinerate them in the woodstove." That's one way to live, I guess...
  • bruceboughton 13y ago
    People keep letters? Actually: people write letters?
    • _delirium 13y ago
      It was pretty common for people to save letters in my parents' and grandparents' generation. When my grandmother died we found hundreds of them.
    • personlurking 13y ago
      I went through a phase a few years ago where I actually wrote people letters. Since my friends are all over the globe, it sort of made sense. I did it because I personally liked the feeling of receiving a letter. The conclusion, after sending 20 letters to several people, was that receiving one is great but more often than not the person receiving it would thank me online and not write back on paper. If there were a super-fast, cheap way to send paper letters, I'd communicate this way when it was anything personal.
      • aaronem 13y ago
        > If there were a super-fast, cheap way to send paper letters Don't they call that a "printer"? More seriously, I haven't seen "Her", but isn't that the profession of its protagonist? -- hand-writing paper letters as a service, that is. Perhaps there's a market there, but I sort of doubt it; it seems to me that almost all the unique value of sending a hand-written letter would be absent in a case where the actual process of writing was farmed out to some random stranger.
    • theorique 13y ago
      The letter archives of people in history are a source of lots of useful historical information.
• DanBC 13y ago
  You're just excluding yourself from the pool of data that the future people have available when they archeologise our present day. Please, think of them poor sods having to trawl through YouTube comments and the worst Reddit threads.
• _delirium 13y ago
  Is it impossible that people can have conversations that both: 1) are real and interesting conversations; but 2) are also improved by accurate facts? Some kind of "in the moment" banter where accuracy is irrelevant is fun sometimes, sure, but it's not the only mode of conversation, or to my mind the most interesting. I have plenty of conversations that are both excellent conversations and come into necessary contact with facts. Sometimes the facts are purely from memory, but sometimes it's useful to look them up, if one or both of us aren't sure we remember them properly, or recognize a gap in our knowledge. A few topics in only the past week that benefited from looking up some facts: 1) talking with my parents about the circumstances under which my great-grandparents emigrated from Sweden; 2) discussing my uncle's MS treatment/management with family; 3) having a friendly argument with a friend about promising directions in artificial intelligence; and 4) discussing similarities and differences between some aspects of Danish and American culture. It's not really a particularly new addition to conversation, either. Nowadays when you look something up it's probably on the internet, but when I was younger, conversations would sometimes involve pulling a reference book off the shelf to add some context or a point of reference to the discussion (atlases especially, but occasionally an encyclopedia or almanac).
• rsynnott 13y ago
  > I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth > I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone That whole deleting all communications to avoid over-inflated sense of self-worth thing? IT'S NOT WORKING.
• TeMPOraL 13y ago
  > I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. (...) facts aren't as important as the spirit of the conversation. I prefer my conversations to be both entertaining and factually accurate. I don't know why should we hold conversations to such low standards that facts doesn't matter. But then it's probably how gossips, urban legends and general bullshit-beliefs spread. I do occasionally Google things on my phone while sitting with friends and family, usually not to fact-check, but to provide some immediate answers to questions raised (recent example - family discussing the Old Catholic Church; we had only vague understanding of their beliefs, and the conversation was significantly improved by me skimming and summarizing the Wikipedia article). But my point is, how we're to reach the full extend of "extended mind" concepts, if people keep frowning upon using technological improvement in social contexts? It's as much with Googling stuff in a bar, as with the common hate toward Google Glass users. Some of the current social norms are IMO dumb and need to change.
• semerda 13y ago
  Very interesting perspective. I like it. Our brains are also made to forget. People with hyperthymesia (autobiographical memory) are not better off remembering everything. So nature has fine tuned this system of engage and forget.