Nope.  Still alive and kicking.

I recently joined Facebook after someone started a group for my old high school (which doesn’t exist anymore as of like the mid-1980s, so it is a little different than just any old reunion group).  It just adds one more wasteful thing to my already busy list of way more important things to do.

So, in Facebook, you suddenly get reconnected with all sorts of people you probably didn’t really want to reconnect with.  You also get to find people you really wanted to find but never could.  It’s a tradeoff of sorts.  Sometimes you even find that the world is really really small and one of your blog buddies from Illinois is friends with your Virginia coworker from 1991.  That was sort of eerie in a Six Degrees sort of way.

As I was poking around on Facebook, I had an interesting thought (interesting to me anyway).  People are pulling out various and sundry photos from the past and posting them.  They are few and far between.  There’s a little implied blackmail thing going on, in a fun sort of way, of course.

So the revelation for me was how different my childrens’ lives will be in the future.  There will be photos of every waking moment of their lives.  We got our first digital camera in 2001.  Simon was 4, Alvin was not quite 2, and Theodore had just been born.  We have TONS of film photos of the older 2 (well, more truthfully, the oldest), but since the moment we got a digital camera, I have taken kept (let me go check my Photoshop catalog….) 25,513 photos!.  I have tagged about 70% of them (I’ve been really good in the last year about tagging as I import them to the catalog).

Every.single.milestone in their lives has been captured in a photo.  Will anyone give a crap later on?  Who is going to look at these photos?  We certainly aren’t going to force people to sit through slideshows!  Oh wait.  We already do that.

I have noticed that kids today also document their own worlds.  My kids are no exception.  They have digital cameras and a digital video camera.  This could definitely come back to haunt them or their families sometime (an example would be the Facebook and MySpace pages of 4 local teens killed in a tragic highway accident showing pictures of themselves drinking, etc.).   We used to protect our privacy, but now we advertise our lives on the web via blogs and personal pages.  Isn’t that weird?