It's almost accepted these days that everyone has some kind of online presence, even if it's just a facebook page. But as we hop from myspace to facebook to twitter to chat roulette, what kind of legacy do we leave behind. What happens to all the images on flikr, on countless pages across the web? As the year's pass they seem to dissipate and become less relevant as the latest fad takes over.
In a way it seems like a bit of a shame. Why should all these things be lost and fade away like our memories, is it just a product of human nature that things should becoming increasingly difficult to recall or fuzzy around the edges. Either way, the web is starting to move away from broken links and missing pages to a place with a defined core. Imagine a web with no broken links where everything was linked to everything else in a meaningful way, the same way people are linked to us in our lives - our photos are the traces of our lives and our interactions online the building blocks of a digital future that persists.
What kind of legacy does this leave, 20, 30, 50 years down the line for our family and friends? What would it look like when our lives are documented and recorded. It's certainly a lot harder to lose people these days, indeed we're far more likely to hear about someone online than we are to bump into them or hear about them second hand. It's important to make sure as we move into a world where our world is increasingly online that we are able to make choices about what is stored and how that information is used. Having more open controls over that on a global scale (i.e. I control the information about me) is going to be critical if people are going to be able to learn to trust the internet of the future. I would like to see more transparency, even a website that allows me to control what there is of me out there. Copyright and ownership issues aside - If my digital life is going to live on forever, I'd like to at least be able to write my digital grave stone.. i.e. "I thought it was just a virus"..
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