Can we really trust this ‘cloud’ with all our precious photos?!
John Arnold’s great, great grandmother Mary Barry, 1826-1902, pictured around 1897. John harks back to the days before the ‘cloud’, when photos were photos!
It’s the very same with division, and don’t talk to me about long division!
Maybe I’m gifted in other ways, but certainly not in any mathematical manner, good, bad or indifferent.
Over the years, I often regretted not being able to do ‘sums’ - when it came to measuring a door and calculating how much timber I’d need to replace it, or when someone asked me to measure out a yard and work out how many ‘metres’ of concrete ‘twould take to cover it to a depth of maybe four inches!
You’d often hear the phrase, ‘Well, he didn’t lick it off the stones’, or ‘The apple never falls far from the tree’ -both refer to a gift or gifts inherited from one or both parents, but neither of these old truisms apply to me!
By all accounts, my father was a genius as regards mechanics, carpentry, electricity, and all kinds of crafts, and he never had access to a calculator. Similarly with Mam - she could work out in her head the price of a ‘weight’ or a half hundred-weight of potatoes at 30 bob a bag. She sold malting barley by the barrel, sugar beet by the tonne, and knew the weight of a fat lamb by running her finger along its back!
Ya, I know, most acquaintances of mine still refuse to believe that I never passed a maths exam in secondary school. It’s no reflection on the teaching staff of St Colman’s College, Fermoy, in the late ’60s and early ’70s that I was a complete failure at anything mathematical.
After the Inter Cert results came out, I begged the late Canon Twohig to allow me give up maths altogether and keep on Latin! Of course, the College President had no choice in the matter as maths, English, and Irish were the three ‘core’ compulsory subjects.
Some say I didn’t try hard enough -maybe so, but to this day anything involving figures or calculations is beyond me entirely.
Yes, over the last two decades I’ve surprised even myself by learning to type on a computer keyboard with the finger next to my thumb of my left hand. Occasionally, I’ve tried to use a second finger or even the index finger of the right hand, but usually with woeful results as I tend to make multiple mistakes.
Now, I fully understand all the technological progress made in the last few decades, well, maybe I don’t understand it, but I accept it without really grasping the why and wherefore behind it.
How can a simple sample of saliva taken from your nose or mouth be ‘matched’ to people all over the world? It’s amazing - stupendous really - but I do accept that the 5,600 persons who have ‘matched’ me are indeed my cousins - some very close and others maybe twelfth cousins thrice removed.
Similarly, it’s just beyond me this thing about how information is stored somewhere called ‘the cloud’.
You might remember a superb song written by Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now? I was only nine years old when the American songstress penned the classic song. It was first a hit for Judy Collins and later for Joni herself. In it, Mitchell questions the reality, the existence and the illusions of clouds - a metaphor for life itself.
Lads, sometimes I do really, seriously worry about this cloud thing, and as Joni predicted way back then, I really don’t know clouds at all.
By all accounts, the capacity of ‘the cloud’ is indefinable and limitless. Is it some kind of a technological ‘heaven’ that eye has not seen or ear heard of? Maybe so, but remember long ago, Thomas - or doubting Thomas as he was later called? He refused to believe in the Resurrection of Christ until he saw the wounds on his side and hands.
Look, I’m not that sceptical, but I’m just not convinced that millions, yerra no, but zillions and trillions of items of information and data and so on and so forth ad infinitum can be ‘stored’ out there in the ether of some surreal place that we can’t see or touch!
Usually, when something sounds too good to be true, then it’s not true! Look, I know that the most eminent scientists have worked for years perfecting this cloud thing and who am I, a math-less innumerate failure, to question or cast doubts on their inventions?
Similarly, these data centres that apparently use half the electricity in the country to keep them cooled - is this the future of everything? Will the human brain and our own individual memory be redundant in a few years? Why will children in schools all over the world need to learn anything?
Artificial intelligence, computers, apps, and the divil knows what kind of futuristic thing-a-ma-jigs will reduce humankind to sort of zombies with no real purpose in life!
‘Aisy on’, ye may say, ‘you’re losing the run of yourself with your over-fertilised imagination’.
Not so, say I - look, I’m not a scientist, sure I’ve admitted I cant even divide or multiply, but lads, it doesn’t take a genius or even a middling smart man or woman to see the way things are going.
Take a simple thing like a photograph. Long ago we used to call ’em snaps or pictures. For decades, a camera with a film was needed to reproduce an image. Fair play to modern technology - credit where credit is due - rolls of film are no longer needed.
Now photos are taken by phones. Apparently, many modern smartphone - as opposed to the ‘stupid’ phone I still use - can store literally thousands of pictures. Someone told me lately that you can buy extra space for storage.
My problem with all this new-age method of taking and keeping pictures is that it nearly makes photograph albums into antiques - the light of other days.
OK, I presume with a press of a button on the phone or a deft swipe of a finger, such pictures can appear on one’s TV screen for the crowd to see. That’s all fine and dandy, but when pictures - uncountable amounts of them - are stored in the ‘cloud’, is there any absolute guarantee some ‘virus’ won’t simply wipe them all out?
Long ago, if that happened you’d just get the ‘negative’ and print another, or latterly take the picture from the album and copy it. These alternatives have disappeared from the world of today and I shudder to think what can happen to all the stuff stored out there somewhere!
The old Christin concepts of limbo and purgatory have largely been forgotten. Will this famous or infamous ‘cloud’ go down the same path into oblivion in the future?
This is not my unscientific opinion, more of a hunch - but then what do I know?
App?
