The Self-Assembly of a Digital Factory

I'd had my phone only six weeks, and had begun using it only when we landed in Reykjavik, since my old phone didn't work there. Knowing this in advance, I'd bought my new one principally to have connectivity work and other Internet requirements abroad, especially Skype, which thankfully worked great right off the bat. 

At the time of my purchase I hadn't cared about the size of the phone memory, since I don't download media files much. I didn't imagine I would use it. But soon I began to care about the phone memory a lot.

In Sweden, I had blissfully begun to accumulate hundreds and then thousands of images of in public all the while thinking the memory on the phone was ample for my usage. Then in downtown Stockholm, after a fantastic successful pass through all the five floors of the magnificent central library, and then making my way back down the hill to subway station at the central train station, I had ducked inside another church to grab some additional ecclesiastical vocabulary in a church setting.

While taking a gratuitous snapshot of the interior from the pews, the phone informed me via an error message than the memory was full and that the photo could not be taken. I sat down in the pews next to the Swedish hymnals and clumsily deleted a bunch of recent photos I didn't need in order to fill up some emergency storage space until I could get back to the hotel.

Thus began what was to be the constant battle of keeping the photography process going during the trip. Every day was a unique experience. I wanted to take advantage of every one. There could be no downtime.

The first order of business was to keep the phone memory freed up for more photos. That meant getting photos off the phone into my laptop, something that I discovered had already been happening automatically whenever I plugged the phone into the computer to charge it, via the USB.

But that was just the beginning. My laptop hard drive soon filled up, a couple days after that. It too had to be cleared. And moreover I was not satisfied with having my photos only on my laptop. I wanted to put them up into the cloud (that too had already been happening, to a limited degree). But the hotel wifi in Sweden was often not up to the speed requirements for this, given the hundreds of photos I was generating each day, just by walking around the city.

I soon fell behind on this daily chore of uploading. Often it was the last activity of the day before retiring for the night, at times accomplished with the laptop open through the night, uploading at the painfully slow rate of the connection. The status of the upload was often the first thing I checked upon waking each morning, even before email.