Our Digital Past.

Life Next year this blog will be fifteen years old and I will have been writing something here since I was twenty-six. Although it's not as much of a personal diary as it used to be way back and there's much less about what's happening right now, there's just enough that I expect that if I'm still doing this in another five or six years I'll be able to read between the lines and be reminded of what was happening at this moment.

Sometimes our past is being recorded without our knowledge as Matthew Malady of The New Yorker discovered whilst browsing Google Street View the other day. We've all gone and searched for the places we remember from our life. How many of us find something this immediate?

"According to the Web site, the images had been taken in April of 2012, and I was glad to see that my old street was doing just fine. That was no great surprise, though; my mom lived on a suburban block in a middle-class neighborhood with lots of trees. What I saw was pretty much what I had expected to see.

"When I reached my mother’s house, that all changed. First, I noticed that a gigantic American flag had been affixed to the mailbox post at the corner of the driveway. That was new. Then I spotted the fire pit in the front yard that my mom and her husband, my stepfather, used for block parties, and the grill on the patio, and my mom’s car. And then there she was, out front, walking on the path that leads from the driveway to the home’s front door. My mom."

Good luck with reading this.   But it's a reminder that often what used to be simply held within our own minds and personal knick-knacks now have a back-up online.  Somewhere.