Realty Bytes

I fell in love with digital everything when I realized the technology reduced the clutter on my desk. With everything from documents to photos in digital formats, I can store my files neatly and easily in the random reaches of cyberspace.

As a Virgo of German ancestry, educated by nuns in Roman Catholic schools, I have triple the obsession with order as the average person.

 It’s a disconcerting fact to friends and loved ones, who tend to misunderstand my need to alphabetize the cans of fruits and vegetables on my kitchen shelves. But what can I say? Virgos clean every square inch of everything they own twice daily with a toothbrush.  Everything has its place, and for a Virgo, that place is on the floor scrubbing with a magnifying glass, checking for germs.

So it goes without saying that I was thrilled to discover the ease and convenience of the Digital Life. Look!  No paper. No dust. No mess.

As I buried an empty soda can in the trash, hoping the sanitation men wouldn’t find it and send me a summons for failing to recycle, I even congratulated myself for saving trees. Digitizing everything was not only good for me, it was good for the environment.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it wasn’t.

A newly released study shows the digital universe is bigger than anyone expected–and growing faster than anyone predicted. In fact, we couldn’t store all the information we create even if we wanted to.

Even worse, we apparently have Digital Footprints—records of our use of the Internet and social networks, email, cell phones, digital cameras and credit card transactions—and Digital Shadows—our names in financial records and mailing lists, our web surfing histories and images recorded, knowingly or not, by security cameras in airports and urban centers.

For the first time our digital shadows are larger than the digital information we actively create about ourselves.

Along with my obsession with order, the most pervasive by-product of my attendance at Catholic schools is something called Catholic guilt. My friend Renee, who is Jewish, says that mind-numbing, all-encompassing feeling of guilt is just as common in Jewish homes.

But there are apparently differences between Jewish and Catholic guilt: Catholics are afraid of God. Jews are afraid of their mothers.

Instilling guilt is potentially a learned skill: through years of effort, I’ve managed to make my own kids feel guilty about at least a few things, even though I sent them to public schools. Maybe it’s the German thing. Or the fact that I just get so stressed when they fail to put the cans in order.

Now I feel guilty about my Digital Footprint. And don’t even get me started about the Digital Shadow.

Like death, taxes and arguments with a spouse, it’s a no-win. Use paper, kill a tree. Digitize your documents…create a virtual trail that necessitates the building of yet another data center and, probably, destruction of more trees.

No matter what you do, you’re wrong.

The nuns knew that. It’s why they punished us for transgressions that occurred even on days we were absent, and warned us, inexplicably, that it was a sin to both squander our God given talents and boast about our accomplishments when we used those same God given talents.

But I wasn’t listening. There was probably a distraction, like a stray paper on the floor.

Too bad they didn’t have digital scanners back then.