What does Google have to say about you?

 Times change, mankind evolves, the computational power jumps exponentially... Some would say: "Where the hell does human touch go in this history?". Well, some would be completely right.

Unfortunately for the ones like me who had little opportunity to get to know many of my family members, and even when I did have the chance I was too shy to talk about something relevant, the internet and technology could mean something bigger than just more expensive-mobile-cloud stuff. Have you ever tried to search for your name on google? Or maybe search for someone you know? More important than that: have you ever wondered what your kids will get when they search for you on the web? Or your grandkids? Or maybe someone further in your genealogical tree?

Sometimes I ask myself how would my father or my mother think when they were my age. Would it be weird at all to talk to them? Of course, it would, times were very different back there, but anyway, knowing them back there could help a lot to understand them today. What would be like if you could know how the grandfather of your grandfather thought (or maybe did not think at all)?

What I see as the generations come is that in the times of the grandparents of our grandparents, there hardly were photographs. Only those with enough money to spend would hire a painter to have a portrait made. Then, the parents of our grandparents could afford black and white pictures of weddings and special occasions. Then came our grandparents, who could take more pictures, but still most of them were black and white. Our parents on the other hand could take lots of colorful pictures of us as children, and register most of our moments. We now have digital cameras, and our pictures can be seen around the world, it is easy, fast, and cheap. When you see pictures of your grandparents, maybe read letters, you can picture in your head a little how they were. But now we actually have the chance of leaving something much more important to those who are about to come after us: we can leave lots of the most different information for them to see, read, listen and watch. For this reason, we should pay attention to what we write, and even spare time specifically to do this.

Now, why would that be important anyway? How would you like it if you could watch videos of the parents of your grandparents on vacations, or maybe immigrating to your country (that applies to Brazil)? If you could know what they felt, what doubts they had, and so on? For me, I would feel definitely closer to them. And that is the point of asking: "what does google have to say about you?", cause people interested in you would probably start searching there (or in the company of their time responsible for doing what google does today). At this point, you realize how homonyms (a.k.a persons with the same name like John Smith) are bad for this purpose, and for this reason, you should probably include nicknames in your stuff and maybe think about other things that make it easier to find.

I know it sounds pretty silly, and maybe this topic should not be in a "Weblogiko" blog, but instead be the "great hit" of some "crying-drama-help-yourself-blog", but I actually believe this is an important idea that should not be underestimated. Normally only those that know you would be interested in reading personal things you write. However, if you think in the long term, maybe the personal stuff is as valuable as the impersonal-technical-objective-directed ones, because (hopefully) there will be many after you interested in reading your personal stuff, maybe even more than those that read what you write today (before it becomes obsolete). Maybe one day we will actually be able to put all the memories of human beings in a hard drive, and all I wrote here will be useless. =)

To put it in a nutshell: let's use the growing amount of space available due to technology to store something priceless for people that will be somehow important to us, not just porn (however, save some porn because your grandsons might enjoy it ;))