No transgression goes undocumented, no inebriation goes unpublicized and no child goes un-camcorded. People have always taken care to photograph the streetscapes around them. But now we have urban enthusiasts capturing construction sites from three angles every day, people who just sit on buses with their digital cameras, taking grainy videos out the window as the suburban wasteland rolls by and an electronic voice rhymes off the stop announcements.
It all gets posted to YouTube and stuck on Flickr, filling up giant, remote server farms like the one Google built on a river in Oregon. It's not just family snaps any more, it's every square inch of populated turf, every spare moment of carousing, the combined detritus of Facebook friendship, artistic impulse and wish-you-were-here idleness.
The world is so redundantly well-documented, it's as if you could reconstruct a virtual reality out of it. In fact, that's exactly what some projects are doing. Microsoft's remarkable Photosynth project, for instance, stitches photos of the same place taken by different people into one panorama. So if you've taken a picture of the Taj Mahal, Photosynth will cross-reference it with all the other pictures people have taken of the Taj Mahal from other angles, and weave them all together into one cohesive scene.
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Without really realizing it, we've engaged in a great project of memory-making for our civilization. It's nice to think that, if and when things come to a grinding halt, our records will live on after us. But as we abandon the finite treasures of printed photos for bucket loads of endless digital snaps, our pictures become almost as fleeting as our intangible memories. The more comprehensive our digital world gets, the more likely it is to wink out - just like us.