Our Digital Footprints

Mike Bloxham, Michelle Prieb and Jen Milks (the last two joined us for the last Search Insider Summit) were gracious hosts, and, as with last week (when I was in Germany) i had the chance to participate in a truly fascinating conversation that I wanted to share with you. We talked about the fact that this generation is the first that will leave a permanent digital footprint. Mike Bloxham called it the Indelible Generation. Mike’s title is more than just a bon mot (being British, he’s prone to pithy observations), it’s a telling comment about a fundament aspect of our new society.

Imagine some far-in-the-future anthropologist recreating our culture. Up to this point in our history, the recorded narrative of any society came from a small sliver of the population. Only the wealthiest or most learned received the honor of being chronicled in any way. The average person spent their time on this planet with nary a whisper of their lives recorded for posterity. They passed on without leaving a footprint.

Explicit and Implicit Content Creation

But today, or, if not today, certainly tomorrow, all of us will leave a rather large digital footprint. We will leave in our wake emails, Tweets, blog posts and Facebook pages. And that’s just the content we knowingly create. There’s a lot of data generated by each of us that’s simply a by-product of our online activities and intentions. Consider, for example, our search history. Search is a unique online beast because it tends to be the thread we use to stitch together our digital lives. Each of us leaves a narrative written in search interactions that provides a frighteningly revealing glimpse into our fleeting interests, needs and passions.

No, of course, not all this data gets permanently recorded. Privacy concerns mean that search logs, for example, get scrubbed at regular intervals. But even with all that, we leave behind more data about who we were, what we cared about and what thoughts passed through our minds than any previous generation. Whether it’s personally identifiable or aggregated and anonymized, we will all leave behind footprints.

Privacy? What Privacy?

Currently we’re struggling with this paradigm shift and it’s implications for our privacy. I believe in time, and not that much time, we’ll simply grow to accept this archiving of our lives as the new normal and won’t give it a second thought. We will trade personal information in return for new abilities, opportunities and entertainment. We will grow more comfortable with being the Indelible Generation.

Of course, I could be wrong. Perhaps we’ll trigger a revolt against the surrender of our secrets. Either way, we live in a new world, one where we’re always being watched. The story of how we deal with that is still to be written.


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