Minnesota, USA -August 3, 2011 - It is common for people to look back on photos from their past or even photos from their parents' pasts to piece together the puzzle of their lives; today some people use sites such as ancestory.com to discover information from the past that they could not get elsewhere. Undoubtedly sites like these will eventually fade into the background when the most searched 'ancestors' become the people who are living in this 'digital age' - us.
With social networking features on Facebook, the ultimate 'timeline' can be made; we share everything from thoughts to activities to places we visit -all of these marked with a date and year forever. Instead of a dusty, old photo album or scrapbook, our descendants will be able to scroll through every detail from the beginning of our 'digital lives' up until the end -imagine the possibilities for those who were born in the recent years who have documented infant/toddler milestones, 'quotes', and photos online.
In a way, our daily activities, struggles, and triumphs will be documented for the generations to come; even after we leave this world, our words of wisdom or humiliating slip-ups could influence our descendants to act in one way instead of another. Perhaps our words could be considered the 'bible' of the family; it is not to say that the actual Bible or other religious writings would disappear. Yet, we often trust the experiences of someone we know or feel we could have known much more than words from someone we cannot see.
If our ancestors took daily record of their lives, could our lives be somehow different As much as times have changed, people have not; life situations will always be similar. Could we reach out to our descendants before they are even born to give the advice that we wish we could have been given We cannot live forever to do this, but our data can. Maybe we could have a one-way conversation with the people of the future. We call it Facebook, but they could call it a memory book, a piece of history, someday.
