It's not just our heads that are up in the clouds these days

I HEARD a woman on the radio recently saying that she wouldn’t dream of using Facebook because ‘everything would then be up in the clouds forever’. 

This lady, God bless her, thought that when she put a photo of, say, her grandchild on Facebook, it somehow shot straight up into the clouds above her, and worse again, could never be got back down. Scary stuff.

There’s something in that. Anyone who uses a computer, desktop or laptop, knows the scourge of saving everything to your desktop, every document, file, photo, web page, until it’s like a teenager’s bedroom, stuff everywhere and nothing to be found. So, what do you do? Well, you create a “documents” folder and put it all in there, effectively sweeping it under the digital carpet. Then you start dumping stuff onto your desktop all over again.

Or these days, you put it all in the cloud. My Dropbox folder is like a filing cabinet with no neat green files or lovely clearly named tabs. I have reached the stage where I cant find anything. 

There are folders, copy folders and nameless folders all full of crap that I cannot bring myself to look at. And I have signed up to Google Drive and Apple’s icloud as well so now I have three filing cabinets up in ‘the clouds’ full of the details of my life and I have no idea where anything is.

I don’t know how my next of kin are going to sort it all out when the grim reaper calls. Add in multiple passwords (I have about eight, last count) and they may need to get the FBI to find everything, assuming, of course, Apple allows access.

Up in the clouds indeed.

Owen O’Brien is a lecturer and entrepreneur in residence in UCC. See: www.artandscienceofbusiness.com