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13 Dec 2007
Afterlife MicroContent
Dave Winer has a post about archiving your digital information beyond your death. It is not the first time he talks about this. I believe this is an issue that will crop up more and more.
Digital Life means that there are more and more digital bread-crumbs of yourself around the Internet. And possibly these bread-crumbs will stay there forever, but nothing is guaranteed. And usually these bread-crumbs are beyond our control. The impact of these bread-crumbs on our daily life is an issue in itself.
I did a vanity search on my own name to see what I could find about me and how far I could go back in time. I was able to back to 1993, where I found my first contribution to a List Server. Interesting to see one's history in this way. But there were also things that I could no longer find.
I tried to raise in a workshop at the MicroLearning conference in June 2007. The response was mixed. Why should we have control? Do we need to archive? These bread-crumbs are just like speech: once said, they are lost. This all seems reasonable, however these bread-crumbs are not like speech: they are recorded. And thanks to archive.org will be available for ever.
You will leave these behind after your death, whether you want or not. Maybe one should care what one leaves behind. You can see it as your personal biography.
Anyway I have not yet formed an opinion about this. What should I do? I see the issue only increasing. My digital footprint on the Internet is only getting larger and larger. In the mean time I decided to keep things under my own control and I use only self-publishing. And I do my own digital aggregation. And I re-publish to the well-known services for distribution. So my tweets are archived by me.