( )

-c-

*INHALE*

What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in what X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”

I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.

It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection choices and subjective bents.

Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).

We need to start a company that develops this service for the deceased. Funeral homes aren’t there yet, so maybe we could be first in! (I’m sure Google is already working on this….)

Kidding aside, I am reminded of both an early scene in Star Wars (with Leia and Artoo playing her message) and the beginning of the game Myst (where we are given an intro by the protagonist in holographic form), similar to Will’s vision.

I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.

I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).

I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?

Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.

Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.

Plus, I think there’s a screenplay waiting to be written about this!

-c-

Think Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity.” Think my own aging Dad’s unacted desire to write his memoirs before his last sleep. Think of dialogues with grandchildren-to-be cum somewhat routine habit.

Egad, man, do you mistake me for one of those twits who tweets, “Brushing my teeth. Than cutting my toenails”?

I know you don’t.

I’ll only join that club if I don’t have to write for it.

Homer: I think that’s why he was among the very few classical authors that I really enjoyed because that struggle for something eternal was so acute. It has become even more so for me since I have had kids. Not that I am living my life for them, but I know that on my deathbed, the one real sorrow I will have is not knowing how things will turn out in their lives.

I think I understand the video discomfort of many, and to be honest, I don’t want a lifestreamed existence. Too much reality TV is not a good thing. I’m thinking more like Charlie Rose, capturing the ideas, the reflections, etc. That’s what would have been more cool for me right now in terms of my own parents. The day to day stuff…eh.

Thanks for the extended comment, Clay.

It reminds me of the fine 1995 Andy Garcia film, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead. Garcia plays a gangster-gone-straight who runs a business videotaping terminal patients speaking to they’re loved ones for posterity.

That was cutting edge in 1995, and the taggable, “avatar-ed” image you conjure seems so much more, well, heavenly.

I’m only writing to riff off the poetry of your idea, which I simply find beautiful. You hit the immortality angle that has haunted us since, I suspect, we became conscious, as a species, of our own mortality.

You’re a lit guy, so you surely noticed how Homer’s heroes are haunted not by dying so much as being forgotten, being unknown and literally _nameless_ to their descendants. Glory would at least cause their _name_ to live on in the stories of their exploits.

Then of course there’s the dream of heaven as another immortality wish.

But this waking dream you had. It takes both Homer and Heaven one further: the science and technology have made it possible for us to live on, to be known so intimately now. That’s beautiful.

Doesn’t it make you want to defy the strange resistance we all have in this edu-world to posting video of ourselves communicating, instead of safe old faceless, voiceless text? That question has been on my mind lately about us educators. We’re so video-shy compared to the lifecasters in the larger new media movement. Our children and their children will surely regret that bit of old-fashioned modesty in us. I’m feeling the urge to overcome it.

Ustream, you say? I don’t think so. YouTube? That’s more like it. Webcams. Not on stage, but at home. Not presenting, but relating and revealing. (That’s the first riff. I’m windy today because I’ve got writer’s block and doldrums on my own space(s) right now, sorry.)

The second riff: somebody above mentioned another of our inhibitions - being too honest, too personal, when we go public with our person(a). Seems a call for marking some posts private or password-protected, and allowing access only to our intimate audiences?

And the implications of your idea regarding our tagging practices. When you include future branches of your family tree in your conception of “audience,” that would seem to add new levels to tagging practices.

I really loved this post. Now it’s got me thinking of Spielberg’s A.I. The kid getting holographic answers from a jukebox wizard.

Thanks for the buzz, Will.

I bet your idea of an avatar is on its way.

Perhaps one day a loved one’s avatar can be tucked in a shirt pocket next to our heart.

Thanks for your post.

Modern life has killed most traditional ways of connecting to people in the, past, present or the future. , One good example is the death of letter writing (a lost art for at least a half a century)
One of the best ways to understand history is through the lens of correspondence of one of the players in a historical moment, famous, or average Joe over a period of time. Diary writing also on the decline in the last 100- 50 years is another example.

Blogging a permanent record, ongoing, captures human thought and memory in this way. Even if you are lying outright in your writing, or diary, as I am sure many people did and do on their blogs, it is still a time-line of your that reveals truths of the experience of your life and time.
I guess the public nature of it changes how and what you might write, but not as much as you might think. People even when they lie, tell deep truths about themselves.
Great post, really explores another level of the what blogging is about on a personal and cultural level.

Thanks,
Ethan