US technology writer Kevin Kelly has posted a thought-provoking article on his Technium blog. Entitled “Cloud Culture“, it explores ways in which human thinking and culture might be affected by the increasing trend to have our information, communication, services and therefore an increasingly large part of our lives delivered/sourced via “The Cloud”:

In a cloud world, all your work and data are stored on the web. For daily routines you are usually connected. Your devices are primarily gateways to the cloud.  You do all your work on the web, using web-based applications.  ….  Most importantly clouds should be invisible. You should not be aware that your music, or term papers, or shopping cart is stored on a distributed server farm. It should feel like all this info and activity is on your pod.

Kelly goes on to explore how we operate and think of ourselves; for example:

The Extended Self. Where is my stuff? If I google my own mail to find out what I said, or rely on the cloud for my memory, where do “I” end and it starts? If all the images of my life, and all the snippets of interest, and all my notes, and all my chitchat with friends, and all my choices, and all my recommendations, and all my thoughts, and all my wishes — if all this is sitting somewhere — but nowhere in particular — it changes how I think of myself. What happens if it were to go away? A very distributed aspect of me would go away. If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves — a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye — than (sic) the cloud is our extended soul.  Or, if you prefer, our extended self. 

Right now, many people are concerned about the potential for misuse of all the data that Google can see about us.  Others believe that the convenience of “the cloud” will outweigh those concerns; that such misuse would kill the goose that laid the golden egg, so there’s a powerful incentive to “do no evil“.  I suspect that over time the “cloud” industry will evolve akin to banks and medical records professionals.  Absolute confidentiality will become a core ethic.  Maybe that old epithet about “the high priests of computing tending the machine” will become reality. Or should that be “Vestal Virgins“?