Leaving messages
Within three generations, people start to disappear.
A century and a half from now, there will be no-one who remembers first-hand what you were like. You will exist to your family (who will be large and many branched by then) as faint traces from the past, appearing only randomly in whatever mementoes sheer luck and institutional planning have created. While scientists continue to work on understanding probabilities of disease and predilections in our double helices, a simple name is the visible DNA that anyone can trace and interpret. A family name is the marker. The context in which it appears is the story it tells us.
If we're lucky, we might have a small faded envelope of photographs from earlier generations, images taken for friends or family or jobs, marking occasions, holidays or applications. The original context was for a limited audience - the people in the photograph, perhaps, their family, visitors of their homes. A scribbled note on the back may or may not give clues.
Maybe your house has a stick of furniture, some candlesticks, a carriage clock, some cutlery from generations ago. Unlike the photographs, whose context changes only in the telling of stories and the imaginations of their new owners, continued use of these utilitarian objects adds new layers of context to their worn existence.
There's always detritus, of course - old coins, medals, foreign stamps, out-of-date encyclopaediae, linen tablecloths. The label of "heirloom" enough to prickle the conscience of the owner, until nothing but that label remains, and someone in the family decides that's not reason enough to keep something so faded, useless and smelling of mothballs (even though not a single mothball has ever passed the threshold of the house. Some eras just stink of naphtha).
Then there's the private, the personal, created by or for others you'll never know, without a thought of the intruding gaze of later generations of the recipient. Personal correspondence, wrapped in string or ribbon; This Book Belongs To nameplates; handwritten dedications; savings books, registered at long-disappeared addresses, in denominations that no longer exist.
Above all of that is the official, where names are inscribed and given wider context by the official seal. Public records of birth, marriage, divorce and death marked down for the duration of the ink and paper, and now presumably beyond. Housing deeds. Wills and testaments. Changes of name. Royally bestowed honours. Formations and cessations of companies. Planning permission. Just the facts, on the record, and names there for anyone who wants to find them. The most legally significant moments of life survive longest.
And then there's the added colour of self-appointed officialdom. Those publications that, by common consent, offer their own barometers of societal participation. The OED. The Guinness Book of Records. Who's Who. Hansard. The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wisden. Insert your own cultural equivalent here, but a mention in one of these suggests an exceptional existence, a genuine contribution as accepted by society - or at least, a certain stratum of society.
And so the footnotes of history have traditionally been written.
Times have changed. We don't tend to hang onto useful objects for as long as our great-grandfathers did - increased commerce and wealth have allowed our tastes to change, quickly and almost constantly. But we'll still leave a certain amount of outdated detritus, things we saved because we saw in them something we thought was historical significance - a Band Aid 7", perhaps, or a speck of concrete that may or may not have originated in the Berlin Wall. And of course, the authorities are still noting our legal records of alliances and reproduction.
But what about our own data? How much of that will remain in 150 years? Of our private messages, probably very little. Without the physicality that letters bring, our conversations with loved ones from afar are already disappearing - all of your phone calls, no matter how heated or tender, vanished forever in the same moments that they were created. Emails will doubtless disappear too, as accounts are deleted through inaction. How about "friends locked" content on Livejournal? Will data houses one day create a hundred-years rule, where once personally sensitive information will be released for the sake of learning about the past? More likely, the historians studying our generation will be hardware hackers. If your forbears are to read your private correspondence and thoughts, it will depend entirely on the whimsical fate of the hard drive in your computer, and the hackaeologist who finds it.
And our self-appointed officials have also changed. The world view represented by our new, online social barometers is less aristocratic than their predecessors, but far more technology focused in theme. The Wikipedia. IMDB. Lexus Nexus. Amazon, as both matter of record and supplier. Google. They can be altered by ourselves, or you can find loopholes to get access to their hallowed lists. Self-appointed officialdom for future generations now contains far more of those who did the appointing. And with these new authorities comes increased confusion - was that person really as societally influential as their Google ranking suggests?
However, that strange, web-generated, public-personal space has a far better chance of survival through the ages. Assuming the constancy of data, our great-grandchildren will read our blogs and our messageboard postings, see our flickr streams and hear our podcasts, as the archived caches of Google Past make it into classrooms and universities. Creations like Hanzo:web add to the layers. Our tag clouds may yet survive us, to be used for 'show and tell' in 2156 - that is, assuming that future generations know your nicknames. The more obscure and inconsistent the choice of username, the smaller the chance that what you write or tag will be picked up by your successors.
The concept of webpage as historical document is a sobering one. Self-promotion and overexaggeration in the public arena are not new phenomena, but for the first time, the wider, poorly phrased public arena will outlast us. We can't plant time capsules or send emails that we can guarantee will last that long. But publicly available, cachable, internet-archivable data - it is here that those of us who are online's names will live on, providing a certain kind of personal-public insight into our lives for our successors. As a legacy, it feels less complex than what we received from our forbears. Little private correspondence, either sent or received, will be available. Objects may last, but will probably feel more emotionally resonant for being heirlooms than they ever were for those of us who bought them. Instead, it's the public record and so much data.
It's going to leave a hell of a mess for the great-grandkids.