Yesterday it dawned on me that the advent of social networks, email and the internet as a publishing platform means two things for future generations:

1. Kids will never, ever lose touch with their childhood friends anymore (unless they want to!). An email adress (or parents exchanging email addresses / facebook IDs / Twitter IDs …) will be enough to ensure you can find that person decades later in one morning session on Google.
2. Decades later, I’ll have to live through my kids going through my Twitter / Blogging history, in full public view, on a boring summer afternoon while I’m at work.

Something we’re not fully understanding at the moment – because we’re so enthralled and entertained by the current Web 2.0 platforms – is the longevity the content we generate can potentially have. Whereas we learnt about previous generations lives through tatty old photos and stories relayed to us, future generations probably only have to spend an afternoon on Google to unearth our most detailed thoughts and postings from years / decades back on various social networks, blog platforms, forums, and so on. They may be able to re-live years of our lives on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute basis; mapping out what we did, where we were, what we thought, who we were with and photos / videos of the event. That’s somewhat freaky … but I suspect we have to get used to this fact.

Even websites that were taken offline a number of years ago can be dug up through the Wayback Machine. Using this site, I unearthed previous incarnations of my website and was horrified at my primative (alright, I may not be much better now) web design skills back then.

Things you say and do on the web, echo for eternity on Google …

Btw, if my kids are reading this, hi!