Do You Want To Be Remembered?

I read an article yesterday about the transition from the "Me" generation to the "All About Me" generation. As you and I know, millions of people (over a billion, actually, but I don't know if it's up to two billion yet) are capturing snapshots of their lives and posting them on the Internet. We record the thoughts that we assemble in our daily lives, the instantaneous moments ("Went down to the mailbox to get paper, saw my neighbor's new puppy. Happy!"), the major events and all sorts of hobbies or other interests.

The Internet went from a high-speed communication tool for scientists, researchers and engineers to a means for revolutionaries to plan government overthrow/disruption. Who knew this would happen?

Very few of us have verifiable, written, first- or second-person accounts of the behaviours of our ancestors from more than a few hundred years ago. Since the dawn of photography, many of us have "true" images of our ancestors (as opposed to idealized paintings of them) and a smaller number of us have moving picture films of our ancestors in action, including their voices. Photography is not limited to our visible light range - we also take X-ray images we can keep. As technology progresses, we will have other images of our internal body processes to share with descendants, including EEG/EKG traces and fMRI/PET 3D composite sequences. We can have our DNA analyzed for disease susceptibility and genetic ancestral migration.

Just like the generic capabilities of the Internet allows it to transform from one tool to another, the detailed memories of our ancestors will transform our understanding of who we came from, who we are and who our offspring are most likely to become.

As more and more people post photos, videos and text commentaries about their lives, we get the opportunity to find ourselves in the backgrounds of other people's lives (using face technology software, for instance), giving us not only a more detailed picture about our lives but also details about the lives of people with whom we interact passively. Pretty soon, you can go past Google-ing a person's name to finding out what that person has been doing by searching links to a person's face or body features.

Imagine walking down a street as a tourist, snapping photos of architectural landmarks while security cameras and other tourists' cameras capture images of you.

So, when you want to try to remember the name of a bookshop owner you ran into but didn't write down or take a photo of, thinking you'd lost hope to get that first edition copy of your favorite author's work from the bookshop owner, you can run a search of photos of the area you toured that included your face and backtrack the street until you find the image of you standing in front the bookshop owner, run a face technology search on him until you find him standing in front of his bookshop on the other side of Earth. You also see his shopping patterns, like the fact that he buys a certain bottle of wine at a corner wine shop once a week, so you have that wine delivered to him in thanks for sending you that first edition book.

In the not-so-distant future, we will be able to fast-forward through the lives of our ancestors, see their actions, feel their emotions and know how they handled every situation in their lives. Or rather, our descendants will be able to fast-forward through our lives and know all the facts about us, whether we intended them to see us or not.

The more we share about ourselves, the more we share about others. It may seem innocent to post a tweet about a neighbor buying a new puppy only to find out later that the puppy was intended as a surprise for a young daughter who was following you on twitter and she discovered the surprise before her father could give her the puppy, taking away the only bit of joy the unemployed man had. Just like I discovered that a friend's proud confession to her middle-aged friends that she had sex for the first time when she was 14 runs counter to her recent facebook posts of a billboard for abstinence that she's sharing with her children, teaching them to wait to have sex - when her children get older, they'll have both instances of their mother's comments available for Internet searches, and what will they conclude? Social mores of two different time periods? Hypocrisy? The social effects of AIDS? The change in one's economic status? Nothing, because they skipped over those details to focus on something else about their mother?

In this Internet age, there are no more secrets for those who participate. Do you want to be remembered? If you're here reading this, the answer, of course, is yes. You have no choice. So the next time you walk by a security camera, wave hello or say something like, "Hey, my future great-grandchildren, I'm having a wonderful day and I hope you are, too!" It'll be like putting a message in a bottle for future generations to find on a stranded beach one day.