Thought of the Day - Electronic Minimalism

Really random thought, but one of the best things about the electronic age is that you can dramatically reduce your number of physical possessions while still retaining the benefits of having them. Do you really need all of those CD's or can you rip them and keep them all on an iPod or portable Hard Drive. Heck maybe you can even upload them somewhere so that you have zero space requirement and can access them everywhere. The same goes for films, books and many other things. You could probably compress all of the 'media' you have onto a single removable hard drive, hook it up to a network and you can access it worldwide or take it with you.

But while it may be minimalistic physically it is the opposite of minimalism mentally. If anything because of the reduced space requirements it encourages us to keep everything all the time. Personally i keep a lot of things (both physical and electronic) 'just in case' but it is much easier to justify the electronic, it doesn't take up any space and hey it might come in handy in the future. The sad fact is that electronic clutter is probably even worse than physical. Just because you have everything stored doesn't mean that you will be able to find what you are looking for, think of all of the disparate locations; CD-R's, DVD-R's, hard drives, online services etc. None of them are linked and unless you are very sad (and create a database of all of you files) there isn't a way to search them all at once. Worse still is the volatility of most of the above, the dye in CD-R's and DVD-R's fades over time rendering the discs useless, hard drives fail, websites shut down or change their terms of use all the time. Not to mention file types and connections that rapidly become obsolete. Combine all of that together and even if you can find where something should be you still might not have access to it.

Real minimalism should be physical and mental, shedding everything you don't need on a regular basis and getting rid of things once you have consumed them.