Inform

I seem to be increasingly valuing information as more important than objects that I own.  Particularly unique and original information.  Having spent weeks this year sorting through files, papers and what seems like (but unfortunately is far from) everything in my room, I have refined my ideas on what I actually want to keep.

If it means something to me, it is important to me to keep it.  It seems that far to much does though, so its difficult to sort through my things.  Firstly, tackling those useless "objects", those things that aren't paper or have a use basically, there seems no point in keeping them unless they are on display.  Yet I still keep several collections of things since ts nice to look at them.  Yet they will be meaningless to anyone else and most likely binned when I'm gone.  So I have found myself taking pictures of things I know if I keep it will be even harder to get rid of them next time I do a sort out is helpful.  I can keep pictures of these things on a hard drive taking up an increasingly negligible space as technology progresses.

The information of the picture lasts far longer than the object that's now in the bin.  Ultimately this is true for everything on the Earth.  When the Earth is destroyed, its existence will still be noticeable to people in the future from the light that has been emitted from the sun and its consequential distortions.  An object can't be transmitted as light but a picture can be easily.

This works brilliantly well for all the paper I have lying around.  Its possible now, although its far too time consuming or expensive, to scan in and even have an OCR program read and index all these pieces of paper and have them searchable - accessible to everyone online perhaps - and have them actually utilised rather than stuck in the boxes on top of my wardrobe.

They will also be kept for a lot longer  - once transferred over the Internet, sent out in radio signals to satellites, broadcast across the whole galaxy.  Hopefully it will easily be possible to scan objects in the future to preserve them fully in the future.  If there is actually any value to any of the "information" we produce.