The Basement and The Attic

The Physical

Physically we use basements , attics and even garages now to store the stuff we don’t immediately need or just may come in useful one day. The thing is they are physical entities.

We are always keeping things that may come in useful one day, or we have finished using but for some reason want to keep. Sometimes it’s because they look nice. I have bookcases full of books, some of which I will never read again and some of which I often reread but they also say to visitors I am a bit cultured.

I used to work for a farmer and every year we had to sort through a woodpile to throw out the rotten wood. I said “Charlie, you have a wood burning stove, why don’t you burn this on it?” he replied that it might come in useful one day, but it never did that I knew of.

I know people who store their old records, CDs , DVDs, books and video tapes in the attic. They will never be used again so why not just give them to a charity shop or sell them?

This is true of a lot of stuff, if it is not reasonably easily available and serves a purpose why keep it.?

Physical items actually take up room and sometimes actually deteriorate over time. I am thinking of cassette tapes and books here, so things like that need to be in a kind environment, not stuck in an attic, basement or garage.

Tapes and books can last a lifetime, but things are only worth keeping if they bring you happiness or pleasure, or are practical.

The Digital

Google is the ultimate attic/basement/garage / garden shed combo. So much useful stuff and bad stuff is stored and Google lets us look for it based on words that we type into the system. The problem is you have to know what words to type to get the information you desire, but the more you do it, the more able you become to find what you need.

Many websites use this concept and store their history and allow it to be searched so that visitors can find information that they need.

Vocal is an example of a site where the search option is so bad that people have to create their own directories of work because the provider refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem (much like Apple) , so in order to find my stories on Vocal I had to create my own directory which you can visit here. It’s nothing special but means I can find articles easily when I want. The community tabs have made things a little better but I still have a lot of items in Beat and Poets and cannot guarantee that Vocal search will return what I need.

The thing is I have a front page, that is the control point and from there I should be able to find everything I want.

Facebook pages and groups are similar, you can pin important stuff and let your historical pieces sink, although they can always be searched, and the Facebook search is quite reliable, so in theory, you can be like Charlie the farmer and keep everything just in case you need it.

In Conclusion

You need to decide what fits you best, not everyone has storage space and you have to identify what you need and what you can shed in the physical world.

In the digital world, you can keep a lot more things and storing them in “The Cloud” and on hard discs doesn’t take up any extra physical space so you can be a lot more lenient with what you keep.