I got my first digital camera my freshman year of high school, almost ten years ago. As such, I have something like 13,000 photos spanning that time period, all easily accessible. I also have boxes of older photos under my bed, which does grant a more tactile pleasure to look through. But I’m less able to put my digital photos under the bed.

When I’m looking through recent photos, these much older photos – of friends with whom I had falling-outs, of past relationships, of friends and family who have passed away – leap out just as readily as anything else. As part of that, I think digital detritus in some ways becomes harder to part with than physical. I can (and did, after a past breakup) collect printed photos, gifts, and physical artifacts of the relationship and put them in a box to go into my closet until the memories were less painful.

Obviously, I could move photos to other folders or (heaven forbid) delete them entirely. But the allure of a completely-accessible photo collection has, so far, outweighed wanting to do so. And thus, the digital reminders stuck around even while I was able to hide the physical.

-Rebecca

PS – And I’d agree with Leah B that mix tapes – not to mention printed photos, physical gifts, postcards, and sdo on, mean Kids These Days will still be required to make painful decisions about what to keep and what to discard. Maybe not to quite the same extent as your talking about, because you’re right that I don’t have a huge box of mix tapes/CDs like I do have a huge collection of digital music, but the phenomenon isn’t going to disappear entirely.

(This parenthetical is here solely to get past the “too short” filter on comments)