Digital Hoarding – Webinar Recording

A colleague recently asked whether a study group session would be recorded. Two thoughts occurred to me: first was I missed one of the study sessions weeks before, and I haven’t ‘catch up’ on it, and second was this colleague would need to wade through weeks of recording and I think it would be better for him to just come to the session without watching the recording. I know I am imposing my laziness on others, but I think it would serve his time better to not watch the recordings, as it has all the uhms and ahh. But we still keep these recordings, why?

I guess there’s the wishful thinking that we would somehow watch them, but there’s also the ‘backup’ that if we don’t know about something, that was supposed to be mentioned in the recordings, we could say that “Yeah, I haven’t seen it but I have the recording”. Or maybe we are just waiting for AI or the technology to ‘watch’ the recording, without actually spending the time doing so.

But that’s the thing right? In this age of information abundance and infinite data storage, the value of knowledge is not whether it is available or accessible, but whether we spend the time with it or not. I struggled, as I mentioned in previous post, of deleting old unopened emails, but in actuality, I don’t even spend time on them, i.e. read the emails. In the case of webinar recordings, we don’t even sort them out; they’re in the drive, somewhere. Similarly with Youtube or informative videos, we save them in dozens in the Watch Later list. I try not to do that nowadays and just skim things and if they are really useful, then I’ll try to snip these parts out.

But then, how do you define what’s useful? I’m still thinking about that.

Thanks for reading.