Today Amy googled me (in a hundred years people are going to think our entire society was handicapped because we have such stupid words. Â Googled. Â Tweeted. Â Facebooked) out of a mild sense of curiosity. Â My Twitter account was the first result that had anything to do with me recently.The very first result, which has been the first result for several years is my Amazon.ca profile. Â I wrote a review of William Deverell’s Kill All the Lawyers entitled “Don’t Kill All The Reviewers.,” which I think I read for English in OAC (Grade 13). Â Excerpted as follows:
I thought that Deverell did an excellent job of maintaining the reader’s interest throughout the book, although his choice of method to reveal the killer was cliche and really quite unsupported
This has now got me thinking about digital legacy and things that can be tied back to us.  I’m not much of a one for drunken binges (shocking, I know) but I can’t imagine what goes through the mind that comes up with the result of “I know, I’ll photograph this and post it on the Internet for the entire world to peruse.  Surely this could never possibly come back to bite me on the butt.”  I am pleased that my visible history is so banal.  It makes my burgeoning political career far more likely to be a success.  Can you picture in 20 years how difficult it will be for someone to run for office and not have any at least moderately incriminating evidence easily accessed by the media and spread liberally across the front page?
My thought is that it will go one of two ways.  Either everybody will calm down about apparent hypocrisy and not judge somebody for how they were when they were 21 or there will be an abrupt backlash into a sort of Neo-Victorian top-hat and tails, good manners all the time in all situations including online.  I’m not sure which I would rather.  In only one of these possible futures can I reasonably expect to be allowed to wear a monocle and not be viewed as one of those steampunk freaks.  Time will tell.