You must remember this
The man above is Gordon Bell. He’s a researcher at Microsoft, and among his projects is a personal archive. An obsessive personal archive. A personal archive that is perhaps the most exhaustive of its kind. The project is called MyLifeBits. As pointed out in the New Yorker in May, the project has some ambiguous implications for memory. How would our memories change if we could externally access information about any given day? How would we determine which days were important?
My own personal archive is much less extensive than Bell’s, and already I find that I rarely, if ever, access large sections of it. I take hundreds of photographs that I store and never look at again. I tend to file things by date or event; if I don’t recall the event, odds of me ever accessing the associated images are quite low. Further, storage raises the question of what makes an image or document important. Should I be prioritizing the most aesthetically pleasing photographs, or should I be prioritizing the ones that document the most significant events?