The Myth of Ownership

As members of a consumer society, we often find ourselves tied down by our objects, the things that we accumulate over the course of a life lived. At times this instinct can get out of hand (see: Hoarders), but mostly what I've been thinking about this week is how media storage is changing, and what that means to the concept of ownership.

Sometimes I take a look at the racks of CDs that occupy a good portion of my bedroom and wonder: I hardly ever have an occasion to play CDs anymore, mostly because I've ripped them all to my computer, store them digitally, and can listen to them in any manner of invisible ways. So why am I hanging onto these physical copies?

One day, I made a little thought experiment. We moved into our house eleven years ago this summer. There are a sizeable number of CDs that I packed up, brought to the place I now live, unpacked, arranged... and haven't touched since. So how much have I paid in total for the physical space that just one of these CDs occupies?

Well, first I calculated the volume of a CD case (and keep in mind that these are all very approximate values): CDs are five inches in diameter, so the case appears to be about five by six. And if we assume a half-inch thickness, that's fiften cubic inches. Now, let's compare that to the volume of my house. All told, it's close to 1500 square feet, and if you allow eight feet of vertical living space for every story, that gives you 12000 cubic feet, which translates to 20,736,000 cubic inches (because a cubic foot = 12 inches * 12 inches * 12 inches = 1728 cubic inches). So that means that each CD takes up .00007% of the space inside my house.

So, what's the cost of storage? Using the capacity numbers I've figured out, and picking a $1000 monthly mortgage as a nice round number, that comes to $.0072 I'd be paying every month to claim ownership of the space that this CD occupies. Multiply that by 132 months (11 years). That means that, since we moved in, I'd have paid a total of ninety-five cents for every CD in the place, whether I've listened to it or not. And since I'd conservatively say I have fifteen hundred CDs, that comes to just over $1425, purely for the space it's taken to house the collection, above and beyond the original cost of purchase.

I know that doesn't seem like all that much, especially spread out over more than a decade. But CDs are far from the only objects in my house that can also be stored in digital form. They're not even the smallest. There are hundreds of DVDs and probably thousands of books in my house as well. Many of these are in mostly out-of-the-way places (since I don't think a six-year old should have ready access to my Hellraiser box set), and there's just no room in the place for all the books to be anywhere else other than the basement -- the kitchen is the only room in the house that doesn't have at least one dedicated bookshelf as it is.

The question now becomes whether it's still worth it to continue this ownership. As more of our purchases and consumption methods become digital, the question becomes more and more relevant. A digital bookshelf is, actually, more egalitarian than a real one. Every title on a e-reader is the same size, in the same place, at eye level. I have to say, I'd be more likely than to try to wade through my copy of Ulysses if it were sitting right next to my Clive Barkers and Ray Bradburys, rather than on a shelf in my basement behind an unused mattress and a pair of oversized stereo speakers.

The key to the future, I'm starting to understand, is balancing the two. Clearly, I wouldn't want my daughter to turn in her shelves of full-size, full-color Dr. Seuss, Kevin Henkes, and other picture books (some of which belonged to me or her mother when we were little) for a dedicated tablet. But there is a lot of stuff in other places that is just taking up space. But if we're going to live in a world where just about all media is accessible through a screen, doesn't it make sense to hold onto only the physical forms of stuff that you have the deepest connection to?

Even the things that used to be the strongest symbols of our culture are becoming less important as an outward show of that culture. America used to be a car culture, but now companies like Zipcar, which is basically an on-demand service where people in cities can arrange for the use of a car only when they need it, can have a million subscribers. It's rapidly becoming that case that a car implies nothing about the person driving it, which wasn't the case as recently as twenty years ago.

I can see that this mentality is starting to take hold. It's a slow, evolving process, but we're starting to move away from the idea of owning objects, and toward the idea of having access to what they represent. It already doesn't matter whether you have a 5000-piece CD collection or a phone with enough memory to hold it all. In the future, who knows how far things will go... Maybe your sense of personal freedom won't be wrapped up in having your own car, but the knowledge that you can get one whenever and wherever you need it.

I'm not trying to predict the future. If we've learned anything, it's that -- if I may paraphrase my favorite online repository of weird information, Cracked -- the future will be awesome in ways that we can't even conceive of yet. But it does seem like the allure of product is well along the path to giving way to the allure of content.