In a vault beneath the British Library here, Jeremy Leighton John grapples with a formidable challenge in digital life. Dr. John, the library’s first curator of eManuscripts, is working on ways to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today’s discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder. Scientists who collaborate via email, Google (GOOG), YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them.

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Online swindling takes dedication even in the best of times, the scammer said earnestly.

The spinal cord aches from sitting at a desk. The eyes itch from staring at a computer. The heart thumps from drinking bitter cola to stay awake for chats with Americans in faraway time zones. The wallet shrinks from buying potions that supposedly compel the Americans to pay.

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A hotel bar in Arlington, Virginia, 23 October 2008. A group of computer security experts has spent the day holed up with law enforcement agencies.

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Two years ago, Asustek wowed the world with the hottest selling computing product to arrive in recent memory: the Eee PC netbook. But even that blockbuster device has failed to do much to boost the company’s brand in the United States, a situation the Taiwanese computer maker intends to correct.

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Word to those who think the Internet spells the end of traditional print media: “hacker journalists” have arrived to save the day. (Read “The State of the Media: Not Good.”)

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Don’t mess with Texas, especially if you’re a blogger on somebody’s bad side. Houston-based blogger Lyndal Harrington was jailed last week for failing to turn over her computer, as part of a defamation case involving the late Anna Nicole Smith.

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There are computer hacks, and then there are REAL hacks, like of the saw variety. Silicon Valley got a wake-up call in the latter variety Thursday, when vandals hacked into fiber-optic cables beneath the ground, knocking parts of three California counties offline.

Some 52,000 households in Santa Clara County were expected to be without phone and Internet until at least late Thursday night, according to a county spokesman. Other counties experienced outages as well. Cellphones were also impacted since the cables that were cut handled all voice and data traffic in and out of the area.

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One of the goals of the software coder is parsimoniousness. Because every line, even every character, of code places a demand on the computer processor, the pruning of instructions to their essence makes for faster, more efficient programs and an optimized system. The art of the coder, like that of the aphorist, is one of compression.

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Professional journalists in the age of the Internet look as doomed as blacksmiths in the age of the combustion engine. Local newspapers are disappearing. National newspapers and commercial TV stations are seeing the Web take their advertisers.

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Boxee, a free software package that pulls together multiple sources of Internet video in an easy-to-use interface, has quietly been building an army of ardent fans.

But what is it about Boxee that is driving the technorati wild?

Turns out, more than a handful of the 600 or so people who filed into Webster Hall in downtown Manhattan on Tuesday evening for a free Boxee-focused event couldn’t quite put their finger on it either.

In fact, a number of them weren’t exactly sure what Boxee was.

Aarin Clemons, who won a Mac mini computer by performing a beatboxed song incorporating Boxee’s name during a talent show portion of the evening, confessed he’d never used the service. “My friends brought me here,” he said.

Vincent Polidoro, a 25-year-old filmmaker in New York who persuaded Mr. Clemons to attend the gathering, said he had recently joined the ranks of those who adore the service, which many people use to pipe video from a computer to a TV screen.

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What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge–broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider–the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on “Survivor” or “Oprah,” then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves–by being seen by others.

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With all the presidential campaign talk about American exceptionalism, it might be easy to forget that we do a pretty unexceptional job at some things–like shopping for computers. No question, we Americans buy a lot of them–the latest estimates say more than 75 percent of U.S. households have at least one PC, among the highest ownership rates in the world. The problem is, we are hooked on the underpowered, bargain-bin variety, the sort that putter around on the Internet, choke on high-definition video, and struggle to render 3D games.

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In my last article I described what it feels like to have your house struck by lightning. Luckily there were no injuries or structural damage (thanks for your kind words in the comments), but our gadgets and other electronics inside the house weren’t so lucky. This is their tale.

The first thing I noticed was that my computer wouldn’t come on. I thought that was odd, since it’s a laptop that works on battery power. A catalog of all the files I had neglected to back up flashed before my eyes. Materials for a book, family photographs, personal documents. Some of it I could recover, some I couldn’t. Lesson learned. I glanced over at the wireless router. It was completely dead. Cycling the power didn’t help. What else? I was about to find out…

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In modern times, hurry, bustle and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people–so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshaling the power of as many technologies as possible.

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