Googling through your past?

The internet has had a profound effect on the way our lives are chronicled and how we interact with family, friends and associates. For instance, Facebook allows one to catch up with long lost friends, and even those you really don't want to remember. A photo you post on a website is indexed in perpetuity, thanks to Google. While my generation's memories and the footprint of our lives are still predominately "analog", with photos and artifacts scattered in boxes or albums, the lives of our current youth will be recorded as "digital" entries stored away on various servers around the world.

While I certainly have no idea how we'll deal with the evolution of these personal digital archives and Google's role in preserving our life activities, a recent message from a long lost associate got me thinking about this. With one gmail and a few links that I was provided, my early years of being a type face designer brought many memories back to top of my mind. Similar to defragging your hard drive, everything about my years of design suddenly became clear again.

While the links to the ITC typeface I designed appear to be still active, the article from Publish magazine apparently is too old for Google to have scanned, and therefore my friend sent me photocopies.

My point in posting this has nothing to do with ego, but simply to show how the internet will change the way we chronicle our lives and it's something we all should consider. If anything, the most disturbing part of this rediscovery is how old I am now versus when Publish did the article in 1988!