Digital Age

From the New Yorker, May 2007, an an article about Microsoft's Gordon Bell, age 72, who has decided to go paperless and pays an assistant to scan/archive his life:

"Bell's archive now contains a hundred and twenty eight thousand e-mails; fifty-eight thousand photographs; thousands of recordings of phone calls he has made; every Web page he has visited and instant-messaging exchange he has conducted since 2003; all the activity of his desktop (which windows, for example, he has opened); eight hundred pages of health records, including information on the life of the battery in his pacemaker; and a sprawling category he calls "ephemera" which contains such things as books he has written adn books from his library; the labels of bottles of wine has enjoyed; and the record of a bicycle trip through Burgandy, where he treid to eat in as many starred restaurants as he could."

Too much information.

("Remember This?" by Alec Wilkinson)