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sunshine jen: Shrinking Memory
While doing a big clear out, I came upon my 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. I hadn't needed them for years. I was one of the last floppy disk holdouts, and I even have a disk drive for my laptop. However, I have since moved onto memory sticks.
I decided to transfer some of the files (most of them old Sunshine Jen pieces) onto a 16 GB memory stick. The memory on all those disks barely was a blip on the stick.
This is no big shocker. I've seen those photos on facebook showing how many disks fit onto a memory stick. We now have cloud drives and shared documents. Nowadays disks seem quaint like handwritten notes.
Then I started to remember how excited I was when all my work filled up a disk and I had to get another one with a new label. Yes, I was doing something. I was accomplishing something. I had filled up a disk.
Then I started to wonder. As our capacity for memory has increased, has our memory in fact shrunk? I used to have to remember which disk had what, and now, I just have to do a search.
I have no memory writing some of the documents on those disks. As I went through old cover letters full of enthusiasm for jobs never gotten and old letters typed in the midst of some crisis, I realized how selective my own memory was. I deleted the documents and listened to the disk drive grind away the past. The documents I kept are now in one yellow folder among many yellow folders.
As for the disks themselves, they are now blank and chuck full of plastic. I'm searching for ewaste facilities near me.
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