Tech Beat: Getting Ready For the Cloud

NEW YORK: In the first of a series of regular columns on new technological developments, World Screen‘s online director, Simon Weaver, discusses Apple’s new iCloud.

People write about the Cloud a lot. The term is both apposite and inviting with its breezy nebulous connotations—all of our documents, music and movies floating above us, poised, awaiting our beck and call. The idea was finally brought into sharp relief last week, with Apple’s iCloud announcement. Apple likes announcing how things are going to be, and as the past decade has shown, when they do, we invariably listen.

I am one of those sorry people who, much to the chagrin of my wife, watch Apple keynotes in their entirety. Game of Thrones, The Killing, Community, all of our favorite shows had to take a backseat to last week’s keynote.

An Apple keynote with no new hardware announcements is usually a sad affair indeed, but this one was different. I felt jolts of pleasure as Steve Jobs authoritatively bulleted the tenets of iCloud. The computer will no longer be your media hub, synchronization between devices will be seamless and immediate, photographs taken with your phone in one location will become immediately accessible on your PC back home, all the music you own will be instantly accessible from wherever you are located…on and on. All I had wanted and more.

I have bought many apps, and spent many hours trying to make my digital life as neat and logical as possible. I have Rdio for my cloud music; I use Google to sync my contacts, e-mail and addresses; I have Photo Transfer to quickly transfer images between devices; Instapaper to save articles for later reading, the list goes on, and with each new app, there is more to learn, more to remember. My life was getting more and more complicated. As Apple announced each new feature of both their iCloud and latest iOS software update, these disparate apps melted into insignificance. With each new feature I felt my life becoming that much easier. No single feature of iCloud is revolutionary, but by tying all the pieces together and making them all so user friendly, just like the original iPhone, the overall experience outweighs the sum of its parts.

This transition to the cloud has many implications. Over the past decades the physical object has become less and less central to our lives. The analogue grooves on a record gave way to the smaller CD, essentially a container for discretized ones and zeroes, bits. Then, as network speeds increased, compression algorithms improved and memory grew larger and cheaper, we realized how silly it was to fill cheap plastic discs with these infinitely transferable bits, and have to physically ship them from place to place. Why not just download the information? Now with the further increase in network speeds we take it one step further. We see the futility in trying to gather all these bits under our roofs. Like magpies chasing illusory flecks of fools gold. Why not just let the bits be? Leave them outside and only call upon them when we need them? They are not going anywhere.

My 5-year-old son fails to grasp the concept that when I e-mail a photograph to someone, we also retain a copy. He begs me not to do it; he doesn’t want us losing stuff. This is unsurprising; we did not evolve in an environment of infinitely replicable information. A dead pig is a dead pig, and once we’d given away our sausages, there was no magic trick that was going to make them reappear in time for supper.

Now we must reprogram ourselves, and in this process, concepts such as ownership become muddied. What does it mean to "own" a song or a movie, if there is no trace of it in one’s possession? When we cease to buy content as such, and simply buy licenses to this content, what is it that we "own"? If all of my music resides in the cloud anyway, do I care if my license is permanent or temporary? Once my temporary license to certain content expires, do I really cease to own it? I can reacquire the license again tomorrow. There is no obvious analogue to this situation in nature, so our minds flit from one understanding to another.

I often ponder these questions when playing songs from Rdio, the cloud music service that launched last August. In an attempt to reprogram myself, I recently deleted huge swathes of redundant music from my iTunes library. Music I will most likely never listen to; music whose absence benefits me more than its presence. I am now confident that the cloud will hold this music for me. If I ever need it again, I know where to go. I take comfort in the realization that nothing can have more value to me than something. I think my reprogramming is working, and I think I had better devise some clever ways to teach my son what it has taken me these many decades to grasp.