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| This wonderful screenshot, slightly edited for the privacy of everyone that isn't me, is from that website everyone's always talking about these days... what was it? Oh yes. www.facebook.com |
Do you suffer from questions of the "existential crisis" variety? Do you often question what people will remember about you after you die? If so, rest easy knowing that provided no apocalyptic event brings down the human race and it's technology, then your online footprint will immortalize your memory... possibly forever.
A statistic I read a few years back discussed the great many people that will be outlived by their Facebook accounts. While the original article is long lost to all but my vague memories, I did find a similar article which corroborates my memories and substantiates the topic. blog.1000memories.com spoke here about how many ghosts there are on Facebook, and how many there would be by 2015 in a American-centric but world inclusive look at the statistics of death and Facebook user by age. While mathematics is more JovialJman's forte than my own, their work seems solid enough to at least conjecture that currently, there may be around 40 million Facebook accounts whose owner has since passed on. For interesting point of comparison, the average amount of people you can maintain a proper relationship with is about 300, and on average will meet roughly a less than a 3000 people in your lifetime. (Basically, there are more dead people on Facebook than you will ever know, as astounding as that sounds. Also, apparently i'm good at being sarcastic to myself.)
So what do these statistics have to do with Immortality? Consider every biography or account of a person's actions you have ever read. How it dictated their lives and actions. Our Facebook accounts, and Twitter, Myspace, blog's, etc, all these things on the internet that we pour our lives into will stand as memorials to our lives when we are no longer alive. Every relationship you had, every heartbreak, and accident, success and failure. Your frustrations, inspirations and painful jokes will all stand and represent who you were and what you lived for to those who wish to know. In the future, your great-grandchildren might not peruse an old newspaper when they want to know who you were, they will look for your memorialized online footprints, and see first hand just what kind of person you were.
It's as equally frightening a prospect as it is exciting to those who wonder why it is that they do what they do. To be remembered by the world after you are gone by every silly picture and inspirational quote you thought was worth sharing. A long time ago I heard the quote that "A legacy is not the things that you leave behind, but the story's that people will tell about you when you can no longer hear what they have to say." Perhaps that quote is now truer than ever? Or perhaps it is slowly become a debatable point as the evidence of our existence in the form of pictures, statuses, videos, tweets, instagrams, blogs, websites and comments stand as potentially ever present examples of who we were.
So I suppose the question is, what kind of legacy do you wish to leave behind for those to personally see for themselves on your Facebook accounts. Do you like that people will have such an in-depth view of your life based on what you shared, or do you think that it really doesn't matter since you're going to be dead anyway? If so, do be sure to let us know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback. And of course, if you enjoy finding out about awesome stuff on the web and world then do please be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left to get all the latest posts as they're published. Also, do be sure to share posts you enjoyed with your friends as it helps us out a great deal. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.
Live how you want to be remembered my friends.
