Do you ever feel awash in a flow of information?  As if your identity is being shaped by the various social networks, newstreams, and push notifications cluttering your inbox and clamoring for attention?  Like you’re just a cog in a massive, convoluted information economy? You probably are.  And that must hurt.  Because if you’re reading this, you’re probably smart, you may read books and love them, odds are that you’re exceptional.  It’s hard to feel exceptional and distinguished in a sea of white infonoise. Friend, I want to tell you about LifeScribe, an innovative approach to Life Reclamation in the information age that lets you emerge as the Hero of your OwnLife(tm) and  promotes reading and appreciation of great authors to boot.   LifeScribe OriginsBack in olden times, not everyone was as exceptional as they are now.  Only a chosen few were considered worthy of having their exploits set down on parchment for the masses to consume.  These few, generally gunslingers, ne’erdowells, or big hero-types like Wyatt Earp went through life with a little dude, a scribe, scrambling behind them recording their activities with a fountain pen. These scribblings would become books, sometimes with illustrations. People would buy the books. The subjects of these “chronicles” became heroes.  People wanted to emulate them, to live vicariously through their adventures.  These heroes were exceptional.  Just like you.  You should be a hero.  Which means that you need a scribe. The Big IdeaThese days, you don’t need a little dude scrambling behind you with a pen to take notes.  You have Facebook, Twitter, Google Calendar, Yelp, and more.  You are your own scribe, creating the meta-narrative of your life even as you live it through comments, pictures, changes in relationship status, new jobs, and reviews.  Problem is...

So, I Googled my husband before our first date. And I also Googled the guy before him. And the guy before the guy before him. The guy before the guy before the guy — you get what I’m saying. Googling begets Googling to the point that I never even considered NOT Googling after I Googled my first date upon advice received by Marie Claire (or was it Cosmo?) in 2002. In fact, I’d often get annoyed when a guy had such a simple name and job that it made him impossible to Google. In another fact, I still judge the guy that had an uncommon name and NO Google footprint sort of harshly. How does one make so little impact as to not have a Google footprint at all? I mean I could understand if he was purposefully living off the grid — that would have been cool — but he wasn’t. So freaky, right? So, given my history, I was a little taken aback by last weekend’s New York Times Modern Love column in, in which the writer relates a horror story of a first date that she went on with someone she had Googled heavily beforehand. Basically, it caused all sorts of problems because she couldn’t keep straight what she had learned on Google and what he had told her when they first met at a bar.This all ended in much embarrassment and her vowing to never Google a date beforehand again. Having met my husband at a bar, I actually recognized the situation. I Googled him before our first date, and it seemed like I was pretending not to already be privy to the information he was slow-feeding me — some of it major — for months and months, so as not to...