How The Web is Working to Immortalize You
Earlier, I wrote about Square and how it plans to digitize your wallet with its mobile payment system. Today, I’m going to write about how the internet makes us cold, emotionless human beings.
Well, sort of. These days, everything is, in some form or another, being digitized and moved to the web. Websites like Facebook and Flickr have been storing our photographs for years, allowing us and our friends to access those photo databases from anywhere in the world. Medical records, books, audio — just about anything you can think of that was once only available in physical format, is now being stored digitally.
And what all of this digitization has done is it has created an immortal representation of you in the canons of the internet. All of our blog posts, photos, and videos posted on the internet that seek to preserve some level of our physical character and voice may forever be available for future generations of family and friends to view.
Although many large companies including Google and Facebook are trying to insure that their databases stick around for forever, there is no telling what will happen to them 20 years down the road, and what will become of those massive databases filled with hundreds of millions of people’s personal information.
Even so, our daily routines are quickly moving farther away from the real world and deeper into the cloud. Eventually, the world’s technological geniuses may figure out how to keep that information around for forever. Assuming they haven’t already.