Living Our Lives Online, Not Written in Stone
The job candidate sat across the table from me and answered my question in an unhappy tone, “No, that Website I worked on is no longer available. The company already changed it again.”
What about her work from two years ago? Already gone. Three years ago? Gone.
True, she should have taken screen shots of these sites, but screen shots are only skin-deep site views that tell nothing about the programming underneath. At NetOutcomes, we know too well this problem of transient work. For example, we once created a complex website for HealthNet of Arizona. Members could check the formulary, find pharmacies, and choose primary care physicians, all on an appealing site that ran fast, pleased staff and members and sold services. Less than a year later, corporate wiped it out.
Consider this contrast. Our vacation home outside Santa Fe has a workshop, where, a couple of summers ago, we finished pouring another 300 square feet of concrete floor. As my son, Michael, then 12, and a neighbor, Archie West, finished troweling the final corner of the floor, Michael said, “Dad, I’m signing it now.”
He started this “signing” of concrete a few years earlier when we poured a fresh flagstone and concrete floor for the portal up at the house, in the courtyard. Long before then Michael had noticed the writing on the floor of the front porch, written into the concrete by my father. It reads,
Ted
Agnes
Dennis
Susan
David
Happy, Missy
June 30, 1960
thus naming my Dad, Mom, brother, sister, myself, and our dog and cat (then).
In a different section of the workshop, Michael had also noted the slab of concrete into which I’d written,
Dave
Sandy
Nicky
Cassidy
July 5, 1989
thus naming my family at the time – wife, a huge golden retriever and a very Siamese cat.
Michael, as is true of boys and girls his age, and men and women in their 20's and 30's, has never owned any music albums in the big, physical 33 RPM record sense. In fact, he owns more music than he has on CD. All the music he owns is on his iTunes account at Apple’s music store. Michael also owns an I-Pod Nano and a MacBook, on which these songs live. But – and this point is vital to pondering technology and what it means for business and our society – his ownership is virtual, not physical.
Years ago, underneath the portal, when Michael said, “Dad, we need to sign it now,” he wrote our family names there, including Jazz (the dog) and Mocha (the cat), and then he hesitated. As Archie and I stood there watching him hesitate, I knew Michael was wondering about Archie.
Archie is a rancher, guitar player and highly skilled mason, a man I’ve known for over 40 years, gray now, weathered with age, but still tall and strong and quick to show a generous smile below an equally generous mustache.
I said, “You can add Archie’s name there. You should.”
Archie immediately said, “Well now, Dave, you don’t have to...” but Michael was already writing “Archie” into the fresh concrete. I couldn’t imagine a better legacy for Michael than to record Archie’s name there. A man who is a millionaire because of the land he owns and will pass to his son and daughter, yet a man without a computer, cell phone or digital camera.
For millions of people, digital cameras mean that photo ownership has also gone virtual. True, some people still order prints of selected photos, but for many people their photo albums exist exclusively on a Website, computer, external hard drive, or backup CDs. Thousands of photos, all virtual.
Michael’s Mom appeared in the workshop that day we finished the concrete slab just last summer, taking pictures of the finished project with her camera. Even as we stood there, watching Michael write into the concrete, no doubt thousands of Websites were being wiped off the Internet, replaced by new sites or simply dumped, vanishing instantly from domain names and eventually forever from caches as Google and Yahoo! gradually forgot them.
Inside the workshop, Michael was writing into the concrete,
Dave
Sandy
Michael
Archie
Jazz
Mocha
and a 2007 date
I have been wondering what this means to our future – that people of all ages are leading increasing virtual lives, playing virtual games, entering fantasy football leagues, owning songs and photos only in a virtual world, knowing that their virtual work, and proof of their work experience, is temporary, certain to be erased.
I know this much. Few people write their names into concrete and then, 47 years later, have a grandson, a child they did not live long enough to even know was coming, follow that tradition and create his own physical record and sense of permanency.
I wonder what an increasingly virtual future means for us. What it will do for us, and to us. That day last summer, before I could reach a conclusion, I was distracted by my son saying, “Do you think we can get Jazzy to sign it? We should stick her paw in here.”
I looked at Archie, and we both stood silently, pondering the difficulty of wrestling with a rambunctious golden retriever while trying to stick her paw into concrete, nearly dry now anyway.
Just then, Jazzy burst into the workshop and circled around us, leaving a perfect arc of footprints, shallow but distinct, like etching on glass, on a wide expanse of fresh concrete.
Speechless, I looked at Archie and his face burst into its hundred smiles of age and miles and he said to us, “I think that’s just perfect. She signed it after all.”
