The Internet is Erasing Me

It has occoured to me that we are on the brink of erasing ourselves as individuals, from the pages of history.  Why?  Because as individuals, we no longer use pages, we use bits and bytes, charged electrons to broadcast our thoughts to the world.

The last generations have oodles of archival information that is passed on after their death, documents, diaries, love letters, pictures, all stored in drawers and boxes for the ensuing generations to cherish, discard, or donate.  Our drawers?  Well are drawers are ever increasingly on our hard drives and on servers in the cloud.

When I die, my love letters are on hotmail and gmail, my pictures are on a hard drive which depending on circumstances, may or may not have a password that someone special may know.  My lifes work is distributed between CD's, DVD's, external drives, tapes, and my workstation.  Who is going to look through those, and furthermore, who in my family would recognize the value in some of my code?  Who would follow up on my patent applications?

I will not leave the equivilent of Dr. Frankenstiens notebook.  Possibly, much of the technology that I have my archive currently stored on will be obsolete by the time I die, like memories stored on an 8 track tape.  For that matter, will I take the time to go through the hundreds of DVD's and tapes and keep them current?  I have 3 disks from an old zip drive, but the drive itself broke a long time ago.  I hold on to the disks....but why?

Our blogs become our diaries, very public, very fragile, and very dependant on the cloud to provide continuity.  They won't survive us, not for long at least.  Future generations won't know a thing about us except what they find in commercially published books and magazines. 

Historians have archives of  letters from men at war, writing home to families and girlfriends.  They have Anne Franks Diary, today....Anne would be Twittering her plight to the world, one thought at a time.  And then....it would be lost in the shuffle.  Like my thoughts, and this blog, and my work.  Maybe I should print this out and throw it in a box.