(image) I’m fascinated by the tracks we leave online, and their implications both in real time (better search results, real time advertising ecosystems, new forms of social behavior etc) and in the long view. Those of you who read my book may recall my epilog, where I opined on the concept of immortality through the Database of Intentions.
This study (via CNet) is fascinating – it shows that nearly every kid in the US has an online record by age two, thanks to parents posting pictures. What I’d really like to see is how many grandparents are online. I sense my father’s generation is on the bubble – some percentage of them appear when one searches for their names, but a larger percentage does not. They are the final generation of non digital natives, and it’s really only pointing one way in the future – more and more of our lives exist online, and more and more of our social assumptions about who we are and what our value is will as well.
In a sense I kind of mourn for that last generation. It’s why I posted about my Dad on his birthday a few years ago, to ensure he had a record.
I see lots of pictures of babies on FB in which I think they are less than a year old. Nevertheless, a lot of the older generation knows the internet but are simply afraid of touching the keyboard or simply sitting in front of the computer. They think they will mess it all up.