Stall The Ball

Some recent comments on a different post coupled with some navel gazing gave me pause for thought.

For the first time in the history of man, normal everyday people, the worker drones, the serfs, the loyal subjects in previous eras, will have the unique experience of their children being able to read, see and hear what their parent were doing right here, right now.

Cast your mind forward 20 years. You are in your 50s or 60s. Your kids are in their mid twenties, late twenties. They are settling down, getting interested in politics, houses, families etc. And as they Google (assuming Google still exists) they will strike across posts made in long forgotten forums, passionate replies to topics that have long since evaporated. Or maybe strike across a post where Mammy or Daddy strenuously objected to cannabis being illegal, cried havoc about the current state of politics, took up arms to resolve the seemingly (from their eras point of view) minor issue of getting broadband.

Follow up:

What will be really weird is that in online form, without all the body language, your posts will be as fresh in twenty years as the day you posted them. Your kids won’t be looking at some younger looking you, complete with a full head of dark hair; they’ll be reading posts from a person who also happens to be their parent.

Imagine posts where a parent to be laments being pregnant and wonders online whether to continue having a child. Or the reforming drug addict, venting his/her anguish online and 20 years later their kids able to read these posts as if it happened today.

Imagine children who loose their parents at a young age being able to, in later years, get a sense and feel for their missing parent. To in some way interact with that person and grasp what and who their parent was.

And don’t rely on forums or blogs disappearing to cover your tracks as websites like wayback machine capture snapshots of the internet and allow you to look at sites as they were many years ago.

I think in the long run it will be a good thing, especially if our children get a sense of us as we were, passionate, emboldened and maybe even entertaining and likeable in the halcyon days of our youth.