Bookmarking one's life

Many people keep their lives in a scrapbook of old photos. My mother also kept newspaper clippings. I shot some movies when I was in college and recorded videos of my children. Manuscripts that I wrote or published got put into manila folders.

Then the Internet came along, with a seemingly endless capacity to make a digital record of everything. My photos and videos went to this Google link and my those clippings and manuscripts were scanned to this link at Scribd.  I have numerous Twitter accounts and at least two Facebook accounts.

The videos are edited down considerably for viewability. I'm somewhat struck with the thought that life itself is easier to remember with a good deal of editing. Leave the bad memories on the cutting room floor.

Privacy is sometimes an issue for those who want to share their lives, but one's options are limited by public records. No one has to share their documents or photos/videos, but online directories make it easier to track strangers if you know their approximate age (and locale, if their name is too common). Armed with a little information, you can get a street address from whitepages.com and then an aerial or street-level photo from a mapping service like Google or Bing. Real estate records are public, so anyone can snoop the number of bathrooms, bedrooms, and square footage, plus the purchase price. That seems a lot more intrusive to me than photos of a birthday party, but it's difficult to opt-out of a satellite photo or withhold tax information from voters.

It's so hard to be private that choosing to be public is easy.