Right now it's voluntary, but I can foresee where it could become mandatory.
What I refer to is having your life 'cataloged' on the internet.
Grammie, of Awaiting Buddha, has basically dedicated a chunk of internet real estate to her first grandson. If she keeps it up, by the time young Owen is in high school, he will have gigabytes of material piled up completely documenting his life to that point.
Long before then Google will offer a service that compiles every fact and fiction written or videotaped about the subscriber. Biographers of the future will have no trouble dissecting the life of the person they chose to study; their problem will be winnowing through the over abundance of material.
And I can foresee where your Social Security Number will end with a ".cit" for the new citizen domain, where every bit of paperwork, every test, photo, medical report, x-ray, .wav file and sex tape will be archived. The micro-chip in the back of your neck will make sure that surveillance video gets copied to your .cit file. The final test of love will be to exchange passwords, so that each lover can rummage through the life of the other.
Can you imagine El Pistolero's biographers trying to pin down what El Pistolero meant to the 20th and 21st Centuries? I can see schools of thought arising regarding what one or another post 'meant.' And schisms will splinter the schools of thought and brother will turn against brother as El Pistolero's words and deeds are argued over.
How much of a post is a metaphor? Where does truth end and begging begin? Can a milkshake really just be a milkshake?
I, on the other hand, will be easily dismissed as a total slacker who succeeded so well that his life ended up the equivalent of soggy steamed rice. But it was all I ever wanted...
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7 comments:
Very good. Bid Brother is alive and well.
I, too, will be deemed a boring loser.
I think it will be abundantly clear to my biographers (who will be the laziest members of the laziest departments at state universities - the "American Studies" departments) that everything I wrote was an intricately plotted Moliere-esque satire of upper-class politics in 1943 Delaware society.
It's painfully clear, if you just ignore everything I've done and read something else.
How about the Men's Studies Department? I'm sensitive enough to feel the sting of having watched Chicano Studies, Asian Studies, Black Studies, etc. enter the main stream and not even the Bryman Secretarial School will start a men's studies program.
It hurts, it really hurts.
Well, Bertsky, I am not sure whether to be honored or embarrassed to be mentioned in your blog today?
Actually you bring up some very good points....I, myself, have wondered how long I can keep this pace up with documenting Owen's life...and, what happens when more grandkids (God willing!) join the family? And, what is to be done with the pages and pages (cd's?) of posts that I have already written? A "made-for'tv'movie" maybe? ha
I was never much of a diary keeper in the past... yet as I get older I find that expressing myself in my "blog diary" is extremely cathartic and hard to give up.
But, I do wonder how a "grown-up" Owen will feel about it all as he reads it in the future? I guess that it all remains to be seen....
xoxo
Grammiekins
Are we really worth studying? "After 12 years of research in the field, I have concluded that men like sports, sex, and sandwiches. That's about it."
You went from an ingenious Grammie idea to Pistols-related philosophical mumbo-jumbo to your own self-induced boring self.
It's like going to Disneyland to ride something in Tomorrowland, get side-tracked and end up on It's A Small World for an hours worth of mundane repetitiveness only to find out you never left your own driveway at home.
Poor Grammie. Things were going so well...
T - I believe that's the script behind David Lynch's next film, "Oh, Man, Am I Gonna Waste Some More of Your Time."
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