December 21, 2011

Take your mind and send it into your future. Wonder around and settle yourself and imagine how everything looks. Wrinkles, bone-aches and blurry vision; all natural approaching features of your future image. But there’s more. 

Imagine your offspring, now grown, with their techno-suits and digital briefcases heading to their FlyPad automobile so they can make their way towards their, hopefully, luxurious job. Picture their odd clothing and come back for a second and see what you used to wear at their age. What a change!

Now look farther ahead. Slip into your most imaginative of consciousness and completely envision your grandchildren. Their hoover boards laid standing on the side of the room, and their otherworldly, mechanical pets stand next to them as they look towards their bedroom wall just springing to life like a monitor. They just got home and asked you, the person behind the glasses that is filled with all the memories of a time that is no longer, how you were when you were young. Automatically, the most powerful and still so mysterious invention of the human race—the brain—activates and, as quick as lightning, thousands of thoughts flood in one by one. But there is no need to recall, no need to tire yourself with memories that may be but forgotten dreams, for the future eases the process.

You tell them slowly and calmly to turn on and access the once most popular means of communication in your time: the Internet. Many servers and websites from time’s past, once they were no longer essential, have been collected in a digital museum with yottabytes of information.

You chuckle at the ease of access that this generation now has towards one’s own past. You remember how difficult it was to know how one’s parents were even if they had things like polaroids and kodaks in their time. Photos proved to be one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century but they still will never compete with what our generation had, the powerful, massively interconnecting Internet. 

You recall our ancestors would write on rock walls and draw on the floors. Very little details ever survived long enough for their off-springs to know too much about the great ancient ones of their history. Your grandchildren are lucky, though. With the wave of a hand and through their voices they slowly found all the websites and profiles from your youth, all stored neatly organized in a huge databank that the government had decided to build many years ago to store our history. How magical and trivial it all seems at present.

In that day and age, in a future not too far, it was the easiest thing to know who your parents truly were and what adventures they must have had. Thousands of verbal stories would never suffice the impact that sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr had helped us managed. Digitally we had encrypted, openly, our whole lives for the world to see. Photos and tweets, videos and updates, shared and reblogged across the decades; it was all there readily available to anyone who wanted to know. And now you are you again.

Crazy, isn’t it? You are now back from your dream-like state while reading this and hadn’t even imagined how much of an impact you are making for your future kids and grandkids, have you? The simple thought that our whole lives will be on replay for the rest of time affects you a bit, doesn’t it? It should. Want it or not, you are making an image of yourself that will depict and illustrate your life to come. The old-age question remains, how do you want to be remembered? How do you want your children and grandchildren to see you as? 

Forget about the silly “you only live once” phrases and start to think who you are now and how you want to be seen as. We are in a unique situation where our generation will forever be recorded, not in rock walls but Facebook walls; not in old, tattered letters but in forums and blog posts. Have you been the person you want to be remembered as? Have you, honestly, been the best you can be and will grin your semi-toothless jaw as your children gather around you and say “Floovers, gramps, you were such an awesome person when you were young!”

Well?