Five ounce bag

Ever since I was a kid, everything has been getting smaller—phones, computers, stereos, my old neighborhood, the dollar—everything except soft drinks and baseball players. So one of the pleasures of working online is the seemingly infinite expansiveness of the work space. I think of my twin monitors as viewscreens on the bridge of the Enterprise, peering into vast domains as I bark orders and warp my way through galaxies of cyberstuff.

NCPR Online is entering the seventh year of its voyage to explore strange new worlds, so I’ve been doing a complete fresh backup onto the studio computer: tens of thousands of files, gigabytes of audio, video, and pictures, whole library stacks of text. Six years of work by a hardworking bunch. All this vastness squeezing down the tubes of the internet into what? A bite-size corner of a five-ounce hard drive. It just doesn’t seem right. The sucker must be made of dilithium, or neutronium or something. Right under my desk. It’s a wonder it doesn’t collapse into itself like a black hole. Or reach some critical mass and explode, blasting out the windows with the long lost voices of Jody Tosti and Gregory Warner, blowing off the roof with old news and art exhibits, festooning toxic blog debris miles downrange. It scares me just to look at it.