[BBC News] Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), a Toshiba study found. It found that more than 60% kept 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, making the UK "digitally fat". "Virtual weight" measurements are based on research by California Institute of Technology professor Roy Williams. He calculated physical comparisons for digital data in the mid-1990s. He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper.

Interesting question: Does the ability to carry around more data make us packrat more ’stuff’ with us?

In the past I’ve asked about what’s on people’s keychains, how many devices they carry, portable applications, etc. and the result has always been the same: People ‘lug’ around lots of stuff. Of course, since it’s all on a keychain, smartphone or laptop it doesn’t really weigh you down - or does it?