How close are we to moving our lives entirely into the cloud?
I’m nearly there.
After losing one hard drive during a cross-country move and another after my cat knocked a cup of coffee onto my laptop, I’ve started shedding my digital baggage in favor of not having many personal e-belongings.
For starters, nearly all of my notes, contacts, writing projects in progress, to-do lists and personal reminders are saved on one Google App or another.
Recent photos are stored on Facebook, Flickr and Picasa. I only have one album stored on my computer, an Al Green compilation a friend gave me as a gift on iTunes. For everything else, I listen to tunes on music-streaming services like The Hype Machine and Last.fm and the latest listings on a few music blogs, such as Gorilla vs Bear.
I watch movies and television shows on Hulu and Netflix, with the occasional scrounging around on sites like SideReel or SurfTheChannel for more obscure or harder-to-find broadcasts.
I save articles and Web sites I want to return to for future reference as favorites on Twitter, bookmarked on Instapaper and cataloged on Delicious.
In short, there isn’t much lingering on the hard drive of my computer, save for an old copy of “The Secret of Monkey Island” and a couple of Web browsers.
Of course, I’m acutely aware of how vulnerable my digital minimalism can make me.
I’m dependent on servers running at their speediest and not crashing, the backup services I use staying in business and the potential security risks of entrusting personal information and documents online. But the ability to live as a somewhat digital nomad and remain untethered to one particular computer or device is so invigoratingly convenient and simple that I’m willing to risk it for now.
And to be entirely honest, I don’t live completely in the cloud yet.
I have a longstanding print fetish that includes an embarrassingly large collection of old magazines and books, not to mention a sizable stash of old pictures taken either in old-fashioned photo booths or snapped with an early Polaroid camera, given to me by my father, a photographer. It’s enough to warrant a guest-appearance on Hoarders.
I still store hyper-sensitive materials and work files on a home laptop and all of my personal writing is compiled and stored completely in an analog format — old composition notebooks, the black-and-white speckled kind we were required to buy by the armful in elementary school.
I’ve also got a modest collection of vinyl records along with a turntable to play them on.
Readers, weigh in.
Am I alone in moving mostly to the cloud? How much of your life are you living on the Web? Do you see extending farther online or remaining firmly rooted in terra firma?