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Welcome to Eszter's Weblog Here you will find my thoughts and comments about all sorts of things from sociology, the Internet, academia, teaching, research, books and movies to current events, fun Web stuff, art, gadgets and just about anything else that comes to mind. If the inspiration strikes you during your visit, feel free to leave a note via the comments link.

[Previous entry: "Mind reader or ..."] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Real winters"] "Why discard anything?" 02/18/2003 Entry In response to the drop in storage costs, Ed asks what will happen to our privacy when everything can be recorded given that storing the information will have no significant costs. He notes that although you personally may decide to leave some of your actions/thoughts/comments out of a recorder's way, who is to know whether your audience - intended or not - is recording what you're up to and how it may come back to haunt you later. Ed also asks why it is that we would not simply record and store everything now that we can. It's a good question. One answer that comes to mind is that information overload is possible in one's private life as much as elsewhere. In order to make sense of our possesssions - whether in digital or other form - we need to have some system that allows us to find what we are looking for. So all the data need to be organized in some searchable meaningful format. This may sound trivial, but I suspect many of us already have a hard enough time finding every file on our computers even with their measly 10G capacity. The less material you have, the less you have to keep track of and organize in a meaningful manner. Of course, there can be very systematic ways of bringing material together, but how much time are we going to devote to figuring out the most efficient system? And if we don't, will the giga- and eventually terrabytes of information be accessible enough to offer added value? In short, I throw stuff away - whether on my computer or my desk - not only to free up space but to free up my mind. February 2003 S M T W T F S             1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28   Links of Interest How to win the Nobel Prize Click for Mammogram Play "Match That Blogger" Blogathon 03 Archives Recent entries » Extending Internet access to low-income communities » Shattered » The story behind red alert » Weekend trivia » Would you cut up a book? » Pizza, cholesterol check, the works » Welcome » A different kind of road trip » Allowing comments on blogs » Paddling for bandwidth » The right to a soda.. at any price » Online communities » Silly.. but we all do it » Paris notes » New book on Social Inequality Previous entries May, 2002 - July, 2003 Blogger info Eszter Hargittai Communication Studies Department Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois 60208 blog at eszter dot com Blogs I Visit The small print A few words on what I will and will not post on this blog (taken from my E-LIST entry of January 2, 2002). I have nothing against posting commercial sites as long as they come highly recommended. In fact, I'm quite interested in improving informed consumer choice so I'm very curious to hear about good experiences with online retailers. What I will refrain from posting are sites that require plug-ins or programs that are painful to deal with. Example: I will not post anything that only works with RealOne/RealPlayer as that program is intrusive and annoying beyond belief and I am not willing to reinstall it on my machine (it was hard enough to get rid of it completely in the first place) nor do I want to encourage others to have it. If your site has audio content, please make it available in multiple formats or choose one that can be run on multiple players (e.g. .avi). Feel free to link to my Weblog with or without this graphic button. http://www.esztersblog.com

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