Digital Hoarding

I've been dead for a week.

Hello everyone, my name is Bobby, and I'm a media hoarder.

Recently, I've been going through the various files on my computer. Everything has gotten into such disarray (as if it were ever in any real order) that about a month ago, I finally broke down and decided to start organizing everything so I could actually find the pictures I needed.

My major project has been to go through my pictures folder and simply start there, seeing as how this is the major area of disorganization on my computer. Everything else is rather managed, save for some... erm... personal material. Yeah, that's a project I'm not even going to consider starting anytime soon.

My first goal was to start creating folders. From there, I would organize the images I had in the chaotic abyss of my picture folder into a more organized fashion. But as I quickly found out... thing's were not as simple as they seemed. No, no... they were only going to get worse.

Here's an example. Let's say I have this picture of OC superstar Mischa Barton.

No computer is complete without one.

At first I though, I'll just put it in the Television folder. Yet... I soon ran into other pictures of celebrities who were not in their stage role. So... I was confused. So I created a "Celebrities" folder, which was separate from  "Movies" and "Television" folder. Then came images of cartoons and anime, all of which had to be in their own folders too, because they weren't real. Then came musicians and music, which I put in one "Music" folder, but seperate from my "American Idol" folder, because that's a mixture of TV AND Music.

All of this led me to one question: How fucking important is it that I keep all these pictures? Why do I need them? Some of them made no sense. Literally no sense. Here are some images, straight from my hard drive, that I don't even remember saving, don't know the purpose behind, and perhaps most baffling of all, feel a strange sense of connection to that prevents me from deleting them.

This is just a small sample of the madness. It's the strangest thing... It's almost like the less sense they make, the more beautiful they are to me. Like that nobody else would save them, so by me saving them, they have some strange intrinsic value.

On a more meaningful note though, it has given me a chance to organize photos of family, friends and I; things that DO have meaningful value. Organizing them was an enjoyable trip down memory lane.

I think digital hoarding is a problem in our day and age. I have a friend who has filled multiple terabyte hard drives with material, a feat I fortunately haven't accomplished. With 50 folders, many of which have sub-folders, and exactly 775 unorganized images left, I'm well on my way to being organized. But honestly, to what end? In the long run, why am I really doing this?

Oh yeah, that's right...

...I have no life.

Image literally taken from my "Sad" folder.