| 2012.05.25 |
I'm thinking about this because I just posted a photo of my kid on Facebook. Well, it's a
comparison photo — my kid's head compared to Limecat.
I also posted that someday kiddo will drive home and kick my butt for it. But this is what got me thinking...
The Information Age already OWNS our children. We (and by "we" I mean, people who are at
least in their 30's) grew up in nearly complete anonymity, relative to the world. Not so
now: there are pictures and documents and all kinds of digital flotsam and jetsam pertaining
to probably every child in the civilized world stored on some server somewhere.
Kids are photographed with digital cameras and camera phones the moment they're born.
Those pictures are sent to people and uploaded to websites. Websites are crawled by search
engine bots.
Hell, I bet I can make up a name and type it into GIS
and will be able to find a photo of a child.
To prove my point, I just opened another browser tab and typed in a name I just made up:
"Thomas Lund." Immediately I found information about a dancer and a retired badminton player
from Denmark, plus photos of tons of other people — including preschool- and elementary school-aged
kids — sharing that name.
As preschool-aged Thomas Lund grows up, his digital legacy will follow. Hell, by the time young
Thomas reaches high school all officials will have to do is Google the kid's name and they'll
find far more information than they could ever hope to consume. Why keep a file?
At this point, baby Thomas' parents have already contributed gigabytes, if not terabytes, of data
about him to the Internet. Photos. Videos. Images of his preschool art projects. Data that all
fits neatly into a timeline. Heck, Facebook and it's timeline.
As the boy Thomas grows, so too has his digital footprint. As pre-teen Thomas is being fitted
for braces his young friends are uploading silly things onto YouTube and making Facebook posts
on top of the contributions his parents are making. Surely there are terabytes of data on
him by now.
I'd bet the quantity of data multiplies five- or ten-fold through Thomas' high school years.
Papers he writes. Research he does. Notes for his classes. The whole world can know when he
gets his first car. Girlfriend. BOTH. The burden on the servers probably expands exponentially
at this point, and keeps on growing through college years.
By the time young Mr. Lund reaches the workforce, any prospective employer will know everything
there is to know about the kid. Would there really be any need for a résumé?
~~~
*sigh* I just posted a pic of my kid on the Internet.
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