Lesson 6 - Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons
The entire 6th chapter of the book Sustainable Web Design In 20 Lessons.
Death of content
In this lesson, we will discuss the subject of “death of content,” which is a critical topic. It is happening all around us, and no one notices it because we have unlimited space in the world of tech. Or that is at least what most people think. Humans love to save data, and we do it all the time. I have been one of those who gladly took 200 pictures on family trips just because I could. My camera is built into my phone, so it is so convenient to click a button and save the moment forever. This way of thinking has led me to a full phone more than once and thousands of photos I know I will never take a look at again. To fix my problem, I started using Google Photos while it was free. This meant I could take all the photos I wanted and save them for free on this cloud storage, where they would be preserved forever.
I would have 3-5 pictures of the exact moment and not even give it a thought that I only needed one photo and that I most likely won’t look at it again. Today I have thousands of family photos from trips and events, and I haven’t been looking at most of them for a long time. But alone, the thought of saving them is excellent. Knowing that I one day can look at these moments again makes me feel comfortable because I don’t like to forget things.
Most people think like me, which is probably one reason the camera is built into our phones. To make it easy and convenient to save moments for the future. But this also has a dark side. When we make it too convenient to save data, we are much more likely to do so. When I was a child, we had to buy film for the camera, and every time we inserted a new one, we would have a limited number of pictures we could take. These films weren’t cheap, so we had to count how many we could take each day to save photos for a whole vacation. Once we got home, we would go to the supermarket, where they could print them for us.
I remember that in the first few years, it took about a week before we could come and pick up the pictures, but as the years went by, they got a printing machine that could print our photos instantly. This made it much easier for us to quickly print the pictures and bring them home to our photo books.
When I look at the old photo books, I see that we only took a few photos, and each one tells a story. Each picture reflects the most important moments because we only had a few to save. When I look at the photos we take today, most of them don’t tell a story, but we have many. We are saving simply because we can, so we save every moment even though they don’t mean much to us. But if you ask yourself: Have you recently looked at photos you took a year ago?
Today we use the internet the same way we take photos. Data used to be precious and important information we carefully created. If a website was too heavy, it would take too long to load, so we had to think about what content we had added. Today a different approach is used. People keep all the data they can, even though they don’t need it. Forms on various websites will ask for birthdates, religious beliefs, and all sorts of details that they will never look at again.
But why? In the book World Wide Waste, Gerry McGovern mentions that 90% of all the data we save is never used. Think about that for a moment. 90%, that’s a lot of unused data, and it takes up lots of space on hard drives in data centers worldwide. But why are we saving data when it isn’t needed? One of the reasons could be that data has become an industry. Companies earn money when they sell data about you to the highest bidders, so when you ask for more information, you get more potential buyers. The other reason could be that companies want to save every type of information because they might need it or want it in the future. But as the World Wide Waste statement says, 90% of all data is never used.
