Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

image credit: Laurel Papworth

Erlene was involved in a car crash moments after tweeting this. She passed away at the scene...

As social media continues to grow, it will come to create a detailed online representation of your life and its daily activities, your passions and dreams. It will represent reputations in all their truths, and any of their fallacies. Your online persona is a reality of today and many wise individuals expend effort and time protecting and nurturing that identity.

What happens to that identity when you've gone? It doesn't suddenly go away when you do.

Each time you post on twitter, share photos on flickr or create content on a blog, you are leaving behind an artifact of your life. What will become of the person you created?

This is an element of social media I had never considered until reading an article on The Guardian about how social networks are having to come up with policies for the profiles of dead users.

It is interesting to postulate how strange (comforting or disturbing?) it is that our online personas will live on long after our deaths. If we assume the internet will be there forever or at least for the next century... How will the things that we have posted online be interpreted 100 years from now? By our great-grandchildren?

It's not fading memories, it's there in digital black and white, it is open to everyone and anyone, bad or good. It is infinitely reproducible and it is forever. Historians will study it. Already we are seeing forum entries, blog notes and Facebook pages continuing to "live" after their authors have "gone on".

I could take a journalistic approach and remain objective about being "online forever ". Surely there are potential down sides to it, but I have determined that I like it.

I believe that an understanding of the inevitability of our digital legacy will at least make us better people online and give ourselves the motivation to evaluate ourselves in the real world. The phenomenon causes us to ask if we are putting online what we really want to leave behind for others to remember - for a very long time.

Your online existence will give your descendants a chance to know you and hence themselves unlike ever before. The net will someday be a place to mourn, to remember, and to celebrate our lives.

A few tips for eternity...
1. Be honest and accurate. Time will uncover everything.
2. Language and customs will change so much of what you say
    will be open to interpretation later. Clarity is important.
3. Observe appropriate etiquette for the application you are using.
4. Be fair, whenever possible give people the benefit of the doubt.
5. Be diplomatic, but don't ever sell short your convictions.
6. An online journal with the details of each pseudonym we had used
    online will be priceless to your decedents.
7. Be Disciplined! You are creating a legacy.

Leah McChesney