We might be remembered forever. All our Twitter updates, our email, our Vimeo movies, our Xbox Live profiles, our wormy FourSquare maps. They won’t be important. Not to most people, anyway. But they’ll be there if the sysadmins take care of us, if the corporations and machines to whom we’ve entrusted our records do not fail or are not destroyed.
We won’t matter to most. But our memories will be cataloged, indexed, made available along with our stories, our names…
If you didn’t catch any of Gizmodo’s Memory [Forever] series last week, it may be worth your peek now. I caught the above quote thanks to a boingboing mention and haven’t been able to shake the concept since. How fragile most digital information seems to me. The intellectual output of an undergraduate education disappears in an electrical surge, volumes of letters vanish when an email account dies, albums of pictures evaporate when a registered pool goes unminded. In some ways, perhaps, our memories must lie in our minds more than ever now that we have 1000 vacation photos on a hard drive instead of 10 in a well worn coffee table album. Floods and fires, real and their digital equivalents, are ever present reminders of all we still can’t carry with us no matter how vast yet portable our storage devices get.
You have more of your memories stored online than all of your ancestors ever left behind. The future of memory is already here…I didn’t go to your party, but I saw 156 pictures of it on Facebook…
Still, the romantic in me wants to believe this kind of mapping is gaining ground: That several generations down, some interested great grandchild might be able to Google (or whatever the kids are doing then) a name and some relevant facts, and pour through pieces of lives lived long before they were breathing. Images, writing, music, art–personalities reflected in more facets than a smudged Polaroid and a few Christmas cards could ever offer.
Either reality seems frighteningly possible. So many memories could be preserved in all their unforgiving fullness or most of it could disappear in the march forward, the only remnants of a life left behind consisting of a dead Blackberry and what was scribbled on the backs of paper in the physical world–shopping lists tucked into coat pockets and receipts from the ATM slipped between the pages of books that were never finished.
Beautiful piece.
Your idea made me think of Harry Potter photographs, living memories that smile and wave back at you. Maybe some day we will start recording profile videos for our facebook pages, to be updated after we die.
P.S. my reCaptcha words are “moodier being”, seems appropriate.
I’d thought this also … until I moved my website, a blog that had stood since 1998, thousands of articles I’d written, some even cited by the likes of Wired, but I wanted to “move to the cloud” and was tired of self-hosting and thought “no problem, Google will remember this for me” or Archive.org, or whatever.
But that is not what happened. Surprisingly. In a matter of only months my articles ceased to show on Google searches, within the year not one would occur in searches specifically geared to suss them out, and here now a year and a half later, not a thing remains, even Archive.org has scan recollection of the bulk of what was there.
So beware, information IS fragile, and all those photos on Facebook or YouTube videos or what have you are very likely to be met someday (not far off) with the message that this once mighty website is no longer, new management, gone the way of Geocities, gone the way of a great many grand services that have blossomed whithered and vanished.