Digital Home Thoughts: Welcome to the Age of Digital Living

"Many have begun trading in CD, DVD, and book collections for digital music, movies, and e-books. But this trend in digital technology is now influencing some to get rid of nearly all of their physical possessions - from photographs to furniture to homes altogether."

One of the benefits of the digital age, at least the state of the digital age as it is now, is that many things we deal with, from music to books, can take up an incredibly small amount of space. If you live in the cloud, you need even less physical storage. The BBC has posted an interesting article about the rise of the digital lifestyle. Instead of shelves full of books, CDs, DVDs and newspapers, we trade it all in for a lightweight computing devices and an Internet connection. In some ways, I can see this as a great way to declutter a household, but is it really a practical way to live? There are the usual concerns such as a hard drive crash but one aspect that worries me is the amount of infrastructure necessary to support this kind of lifestyle. Is our technological base robust enough that people can live like this effectively? What about a power outage? Or being without Internet access? While I live in a very technologically advanced household, I am always aware of the infrastructure necessary to maintain it, and try to strike a balance between utilizing the benefits of newer technologies, and having resources in case I have to go without them. What about you? Would you be willing to take the leap to go entirely digital?