Consumers of virtual space

The other day my QQ mail account doubled again to 32Gb for the third time and I thought how do they do it? Companies like Gmail for instance, if you go to Gmail.com you will see a counter and see the numbers increase before your eyes as if space grows every second. “Over 7467.666583 megabytes (and counting) of free storage”. QQ mail when I started was 8Gb and it is doubled free every 3 months with the push of a button. Wow push a button and space grows? My web hosting company offered me 100Gb when I first signed up with them, now 100Gb is nothing in the web publishing world as web hosting companies are all giving away unlimited disk space and even unlimited bandwidth.

A friend mentioned what is the point of 32Gb of free email space. My answer at the time was a technical answer, because information is growing all the time – high quality still photographs are bigger, more people prefer the bright shiny colors and video with action, sound and more brighter colors. If you don’t have much space on your computer then online – in your email is a good place to store photos and videos. After taking all these photos that get transferred onto one’s computer and seen once and left on the computer while the majority of which will hardly be seen if ever again. We say to ourselves, the photo is not very good but let’s keep it anyway – besides it’s only 600Mb and we have more space online. Then we store it and perhaps never look at it again.

Then I stopped to think about it, what has the digital world made of ourselves? Consumers of higher quality, brighter colors? Isn’t getting to the point that the higher the quality and brighter the colors is getting more and more artificial? With higher quality and brighter color the digital world we live in is making us hungry for more virtual space so we become consumers of virtual space. What? Yes virtual space, this space is not physical space like land. It is virtual on a computer disk somewhere perhaps in some poor developing country, with a technical support trained to take customer calls for probably low wage. It has always been that way, bigger house is better, bigger car, bigger motor bike, bigger boat, bigger garden, etc etc. However, consumers are demanding things like camera, computers, cell phones and other electronic devices to be smaller but bigger hard disk space. With physical -(to distinguish from “virtual”) property rates skyrocketing  – unlimited virtual property is being given away for free! What is going on here?

Returning to the subject of email accounts again, more space and more files to store also comes the question of the possibility to send a 10Gb HD video to your uncle in Senegal (where in Africa I believe you have to pay for your internet per the amount transferred). There is not a internet connection on earth that will allow you to upload or download a file that size one-way without server timeout. If you have ever used BitComet Peer 2 Peer file transfers to download a software, operating systems or a movie then the average 2 hour movie would be only 2-3 Gb if not just 1Gb. Even Photoshop CS or Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux is not even a gigabyte. Still on a fiber optic high speed internet connection to download on a peer-2-peer network depending on the availability of the movie will take you anywhere from 20 minutes to 4 hours.

I can assure you that anyone who sends me a file that is over 1Gb in an email is not going to be a friend of mine for very long. The time it took me to write this much the little counter on Gmail  now reads”Over 7467.678457″, Gmail grew 0.011874 megabytes! Incredible!

Tags: consumer, consumption, material possessions, space, time