Choosing to remember

"There’s too much to remember. Sometimes you gotta forget about the past," said Antonio Pierro, war veteran (Esquire, Jan 08).

Not according to Gordon Bell. This dude is trying to record his whole life. His entire life. See On The Media, a story called The Persistence of Memory.

He's a computer scientist, a senior researcher for Microsoft, and part of a movement known as “lifelogging,” digitally keeping "every letter and photo, every phone call, email and video, every conversation, keystroke and scrap of paper, the entire minutiae of his daily routine, onto a hard drive."

As a hoarder of photos and letters from childhood, I'm not really one to judge. His explanation intrigued me:

"Why does anybody ever preserve anything? Is there any value to having a photograph of my mother at age three or so, you know...?"

Do we hold onto these relics from our past because they're valuable, or do we attach the value to them by holding on? Where is the value in the things we keep? And if memory is merely the retention of, and ability to recall, information and personal experiences... I wonder if the human memory can ever be eclipsed by an electronic one.