Entropy and digital crumbs
Entropy is the natural tendency of things to reach a state of chaos. To keep things in order, you have to invest time and energy in constantly counteracting entropy. Think about your room, for example, and imagine how it would look like (or already looks like) if you don’t vacuum and dust, put your clothes back in the closet, books in the bookshelf and CDs in their rack for an entire month. Entropy appears in every situation, even in the way you organize your files on your hard drive and optical media; it takes some work to keep everything in its place so you can reach the file you want faster.
Some people enjoy having a clean desk and their files in order. Others hang a sign on their door with the message “My room, My mess, My problem” and don’t seem bothered at all to live among piles of old pizza boxes, CDs and dirty socks. A third category is even more interesting, using some sort of “ordered disorder” - they know exactly where an object is in a room filled with stuff, in a closet where tennis shoes share the same shelf with empty shampoo bottles and jars of pickles.
When it comes to our rooms or hard drives, we are putting some effort into keeping them straightened out. But how about the trail of digital crumbs we all leave online throughout the years? Are we consistent at renewing our personal information or removing old accounts on sites we haven’t visited in years? How responsible are we online, with the information that we create and should also manage? Think about all the e-mails you have used in the past but didn’t bother deleting or using. Or, older personal websites which can still be found with outdated information and animated “Under construction” logos. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about - that site you created back in ‘98 with photos of your cat, green text on pink background and a MIDI playing over and over!
This is the Internet we are creating today, forgetting pieces of garbage here and there until their stench suffocates the rest of it. Perhaps it doesn’t seem important that your own actions could have such an impact after the years, but keep in mind that we’re a few hundred million lazy, irresponsible netizens. What your room could turn into in one month without cleaning, could happen to the Internet at a different scale over the years. This global network is still young, but we should all take our part in keeping it clean of our own garbage.
