Caution: your future children are reading your blog.

Mark Everett is 40, the lead singer of The Eels, and has never known his father. As documented in an epsidode of the PBS series Nova, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, Everett goes to meet the people his brilliant physicist father once knew. This journey, uncovering the man who died when Everett was only 18, becomes a sort of emotional quest for understanding.

What does this have to do with how IT is changing our society? In the past centuries, most of an individual's personal history has been tied up in their friends' and family's knowledge of them, plus maybe a few self-penned letters. Now, imagine the child being born today. When he is 18 he'll easily be able to turn on the his computer, Google his parent's names, and learn everything there is to know about them.

It is especially interesting that much of previous generation's parent's personalities from when they were 20 and younger have been hidden, in such a way that it becomes hard to imagine them before we ourselves gained consciousness. Well, that time is over, as all of the blog entries you made when you were 14 will one day be read by your children. You will become very real through your YouTube videos of drinking parties and your Facebook page full of nonsense.

Will these things be around in 20 years? I think yes: as technology makes it cheaper and cheaper to store things, and marketing make it more and more valuable to keep them, all those things you've put online will probably stay there indefinitely. Especially consider that, once something is online, anyone can make a copy of it.

Now I have to wonder, how will this development affect our society and culture? Will people grow up with a greater sense of their own impermanence? Will we be born into a culture of perspective, a culture where everyone knows their place in history? Or maybe the opposite... once everyone's parents become a flawed, blog writing 14 year old, a son would know where his father would fit into his current teen aged landscape ("my father watched anime??") and lose any and all respect for them