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Our Fractured Story
—CBC Radio’s Ideas
I wrote and presented this feature-length documentary on history, memory, and digital culture for Ideas, CBC Radio’s flagship program, in 2012.
Digital culture has transformed the way society understands itself. Information comes to us unfiltered, without mediation. Digital memory is forever. All versions of a story are equal. Vancouver journalist Greg Buium explores what happens to knowledge in a digital age.
As a principal researcher at Microsoft, Gordon Bell was paid to record everything in his life. And he took it pretty seriously. In 1998 he began scanning every document that crossed his desk. Every piece of paper he’d ever kept — birth certificates, restaurant receipts, diplomas, office memos, it didn’t matter. Everything that went through his computer was automatically logged. Microsoft called the project MyLifeBits. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before.
Greg Buium travelled to San Francisco to get a first-hand look at this collection. Gordon Bell’s project embodies the incredible reach, and the mind-numbing possibilities, of the digital age. Every day, it seems, experts are telling us what the Internet is doing to us. Whatever it’s doing, digital culture is transforming the way we understand ourselves.