We used to have shoeboxes filled with photos, and archive boxes of love letters stuck in the back of the cupboard. With the widespread use of personal computers, and everything digitised, scanned and manipulated - we have even more "stuff" that we don't have time to manage.

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger of Harvard has examined this phenomena in the paper - 'Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing' - http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP07-022