Read more: 鈥Forever online: Your digital legacy鈥
We are the first people in history to create vast online records of our lives. How much of it will endure when we are gone?
NOT long before my wife died, she asked me to do something for her. 鈥淢ake sure people remember me,鈥 she said. 鈥淣ot the way I am now. The way I was.鈥 Having spent most of her life as an assertive, ambitious and beautiful woman, Kathryn didn鈥檛 want people鈥檚 memories to be dominated by her final year, in which the ravages of disease and continual chemotherapy had taken her spirit, vitality and looks.
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To me, the internet seemed to offer an obvious way to fulfil Kathryn鈥檚 wish 鈥 certainly more so than a dramatic headstone or funerary monument. So I built a to celebrate her life through carefully selected pictures and text. The decision was unorthodox at the time, and I suspect that some in our circle thought it tasteless.
Six years on, things are very different. As the internet鈥檚 population has grown and got older, memorial pages and tribute sites have become commonplace. But when you and I shuffle off this mortal coil, formal remembrances won鈥檛 be the only way we are remembered. I manage myriad websites and blogs, both personal and professional, as well as profiles on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and more. All of those will be left behind, and many other people will leave a similar legacy.
We are creating digital legacies for ourselves every day 鈥 even, increasingly, every minute. More than a quarter of a million Facebook users will die this year alone. The information about ourselves that we record online is the sum of our relationships, interests and beliefs. It鈥檚 who we are. Hans-Peter Brondmo, head of social software and services at Nokia in San Francisco, calls this collection of data our 鈥渄igital soul鈥.
Thanks to cheap storage and easy copying, our digital souls have the potential to be truly immortal. But do we really want everything we鈥檝e done online 鈥 offhand comments, camera-phone snaps or embarrassing surfing habits 鈥 to be preserved for posterity? One school of thought, the 鈥減reservationists鈥, believes we owe it to our descendants. Another, the 鈥渄eletionists鈥, think it鈥檚 vital the internet learns how to forget. These two groups are headed for a struggle over the future of the internet 鈥 and the fate of your digital soul is hanging in the balance.
As the internet has become seamlessly integrated with all our experiences, more and more of our everyday life is being documented online. Last year, two-thirds of all Americans stored personal data on a distant server in the cloud, while nearly half were active on social networks.
Today, that data is hoarded by internet companies. Google and Facebook are dedicated to storing as much of your data as possible for as long as possible. Even your 鈥渄igital exhaust鈥, such as search requests and browsing history, is often recorded by companies who want to target you with personalised advertising.
All this data will prove fascinating to sociologists, archaeologists and anthropologists studying the dawn of the digital age. For them, everyday life can be just as interesting as epoch-defining moments. Whereas researchers have hitherto had to rely on whatever physical documents happen to survive, our vast digital legacies mean their successors could be spoiled for choice.
聯Your online legacy will prove uniquely fascinating to those studying the dawn of the digital age聰
Nothing is definite, though: it鈥檚 far from certain that this information will endure. 鈥淒igital records are more like an oral tradition than traditional documents,鈥 says of the in Mountain View, California. 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 copy them regularly, they simply disappear.鈥 He is concerned that we are not doing enough. 鈥淚f we鈥檙e not careful, our period could end up as a bit of a Dark Age. Everyone is putting material into digital formats, but not putting much effort into preserving it.鈥
Amateur archivists
A movement is now emerging to make sure our legacies persist 鈥 with amateur enthusiasts in the vanguard. One of those is , a film-maker who recently staged an effort to save Geocities, a vast collection of personal websites dating back to 1994.
Geocities allowed anyone to create a home page of their own, usually using that look endearingly amateurish to modern eyes. Antique charm doesn鈥檛 count for much in the marketplace, and as slicker competitors emerged Geocities became deserted and spam-laden. After a decade鈥檚 forbearance (or neglect, some would say), the site鈥檚 owner, Yahoo, decided to pull the plug on the vast majority of pages in 2009.
The threat of the impending axe horrified Scott. He and his supporters hastily 鈥渟craped鈥 as many Geocities pages as they could, creating a 641-gigabyte archive that initially circulated on file-sharing networks. Other, similar archival efforts posted their results directly to the web at and .
The question that gets asked most often of such preservationists is 鈥淲hy bother to save this junk anyway?鈥 Scott鈥檚 argument is that it鈥檚 not junk: it鈥檚 history. Geocities is . Its design values speak to the limitations of dial-up connections; its structure captures a time when no one had figured out how to navigate the web, where people built online homes in called Hollywood or EnchantedForest. Its users鈥 interactions with each other 鈥 via email addresses and guestbooks published openly without fear of spam 鈥 offer valuable insights into the birth of online culture.
The fate of Geocities is relevant because the odds are that . History shows that even the most prominent technology companies can be rapidly overtaken by competitors or deserted by customers: think of IBM or Microsoft. Companies like Facebook provide you with free services and storage on their servers. In exchange, they track your online activities and sell advertising against the personal information you provide. But one day they may choose 鈥 or be forced 鈥 to look for new ways to make money. Those might not involve hosting pictures of your cat.
Last December, Yahoo announced plans to 鈥渟unset鈥 more well-known services, including the pioneering social bookmarking service del.icio.us. about an impending demise for its giant photo-sharing site Flickr. Yahoo has brushed aside suggestions that the site鈥檚 future is in question, but Flickr users remain concerned about what they see as a lack of commitment.
When such sites disappear, many users feel they are losing more than a photo album. Years of my personal photographs are stored on Flickr, and it is woven into Kathryn鈥檚 memorial site. I have backups, but the photos on Flickr are surrounded by a rich history of social interactions, from groups to which I belong to comments that friends have left about my photos. That feels just as much part of my digital soul as the images themselves. The same goes for anything we share on social networks: our friendships, likes and links are what鈥檚 really important.
Many preservationists feel that it is not safe to entrust information of sentimental value to companies with fickle agendas and fortunes, and are working on ways to give us greater control of our digital legacies. Over the past year, there has been a proliferation of from the big social sites. There鈥檚 also a cottage industry that aims to ensure that our legacies are assembled and apportioned according to our wishes after we are gone. Many of those involved, including security specialists, virtual undertakers, data storage companies 鈥 and, inevitably, 鈥 will be meeting for a in San Francisco in early May.
鈥淭hink about the appeal of family history,鈥 says Jeremy Leighton John, curator of e-manuscripts at the British Library in London. 鈥淭he idea of creating a personal archive for your descendants is very evocative.鈥
But assembling such a legacy is not simple. Facebook and its ilk put a lot of work into keeping your information neatly organised and readily accessible. That鈥檚 not something most of us are good at. John says around a third of us report having lost a digital file of personal value. 鈥淚magine losing your memories of your children growing up,鈥 he says. You might not be doing much to mitigate that risk, he says, but it鈥檚 no doubt a concern for many people nowadays.
A new breed of social networking services might help us organise our data while also ensuring that we maintain control over it. Diaspora, based in San Francisco, is a fledgling social network which runs on servers maintained by its users. That鈥檚 in contrast to Facebook, which has its own servers and therefore controls everything on your profile. The downside with Diaspora and other 鈥淒IY鈥 social networks is that you have to keep your server running; if you stop, your legacy could evaporate overnight.
Still, it might eventually be possible for us to assemble and bequeath our virtual estates with a few clicks 鈥 the internet equivalent of donating our personal letters and papers. The San Francisco-based , which has been curating a public collection of web pages and multimedia since 1996, hopes to accept such donations in the near future. Founder Brewster Kahle says he hopes it will inspire people to 鈥渆ndow a terabyte鈥. If that happens, our digital legacies may be preserved for posterity after all.
Yet should we be so quick to give in to the urge to preserve? 鈥淔orgetting is built into the human brain,鈥 says Viktor Mayer-Sch枚nberger of the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK, who studies internet governance and regulation. 鈥淪o for thousands of years we鈥檝e developed ways to preserve special memories.鈥 Today, though, it is quicker and easier to save every bit of our vast digital trails than it is to sort and discard what we don鈥檛 want. In other words, we might be producing more memories than we can cope with.
聯Forgetting is built into the human brain, so we may be producing more memories than we can cope with聰
We are often ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of total recall. For example, Facebook has been sporadically testing a 鈥渕emorable stories鈥 feature: every now and again, it will show old status updates written by you or a friend. The has been bafflement, with users unsure what to make of these blasts from the past. Sometimes it鈥檚 hard to tell what the vintage update is actually referring to; at others it鈥檚 unwanted, like a reminder of a bad break-up.
Forgetting gracefully
Occasionally, the resurgence of memories from long ago can be devastating. 鈥淎 woman called in to a radio programme to tell me that her long-spent criminal conviction had been inadvertently revealed online,鈥 says Mayer-Sch枚nberger. 鈥淚t had instantly destroyed her standing in the small community where she lived, the fresh start she had worked for years to achieve. This wasn鈥檛 even something she had posted: it was someone else.鈥 It鈥檚 hard to forgive and forget if you can no longer forget.
There鈥檚 another persuasive reason why we might want to embrace online forgetfulness. If personal internet sites really did last forever, the web would start to fill up with 鈥渄ead data鈥 鈥 a reflection of the truism that the dead outnumber the living. My memorial site for Kathryn is currently Google鈥檚 first result for her name. I鈥檓 not sure how her living namesakes feel about that.
In his 2009 book Delete, Mayer-Sch枚nberger proposed that we should build technology that forgets gracefully. Files might come with expiry dates, he suggests, so that they simply vanish after a certain point. Or they might 鈥渄igitally rust鈥, gradually becoming less faithful unless we make a concerted effort to preserve them. Perhaps files could become less accessible over time 鈥 like consigning old photos to a shoebox in the attic rather than displaying them on the wall.
A few firms have put these ideas into practice. In January, a German start-up called X-Pire launched software that lets you add digital expiry dates to images uploaded to sites like Facebook. After a certain date the images become invisible, so your friends will be able to check out your debauched photos on the morning after the night before, but you won鈥檛 have to worry about them appearing when a potential employer looks you up a few years later.
The problem with such schemes is that if something can be seen on the web it can also be copied, albeit with a bit of effort. Human nature being what it is, that鈥檚 most likely to happen to something really exceptional. If we鈥檙e lucky, our finest achievements will be replicated; if we鈥檙e not, it will be our epic failures that become immortal. Another difficulty is that the providers of 鈥渇orgetting鈥 services are minnows in a very big pond. How likely is it that a plucky start-up will be able to pry your entire legacy from Google and Facebook?
Even if we can鈥檛 erase data, we might be able to hide it. This February, after a number of individuals complained to the country鈥檚 data protection agency, a Spanish court ordered Google to remove nearly 100 links from its database because they contained out-of-date information about these people. The links were mostly to newspaper articles and public records, and Google refused to comply, but with the 鈥渞ight to be forgotten鈥 enshrined as a , more and bigger cases are likely to follow. The EU has a track record of changing the way that the internet is used: forgetfulness may be the next big frontier.
Right now, though, we are living through a truly unique period in human history. We have learned how to create vast digital legacies but we don鈥檛 yet know how to tidy them up for our successors. The generations that went before us left no digital trace, and the ones that go after might leave nothing but sanitised 鈥渁uthorised biographies鈥. We will be defined through piecemeal and haphazard collections of our finest and foulest moments.
The memories we are leaving behind now, in all their riotous glory 鈥 drunken tweets, ranting blog posts, bad-hair-day pictures and much more 鈥 may become a unique trove to be studied by historians for centuries to come. In fact, today鈥檚 web may offer the most truthful and comprehensive snapshot of the human race that will ever exist.
And perhaps, deep within that record, those historians will find an online memorial built by a grieving widower to a woman who died too young, at the dawn of the digital age.
Read more: 鈥Forever online: Your digital legacy鈥
This story has been edited since its original publication to make it clear that the Archive Team initiative was one of several independent efforts to archive Geocities
