Revolution in conceptual identity preservation

“Will future generations know who I was?” Ever since the beginning of recorded history, people all over the world have been busy trying to get “yes” as an answer to this question. Only a few have actually succeeded. The oldest identities that have been partly reconstructed are those of pharaohs and kings. They have been carved in stone, often accompanied by gigantic monuments. Most of the information that we have about the people of the past, comes in written form on paper of some sort. Other ways in which people have been able to make us remember them, consist of paintings and sculptures. These ways of ‘recording’ parts of oneself were, again, only accessible to the rich and influential elite. Only relatively recently, photographs and films have been added to the list. This invention made it possible for a larger public to remain, at least partially, unforgotten.

Scripture, photography and film have made it possible to record various kinds of information, but the internet may cause an even bigger revolution in conceptual identity preservation. The Live.on.line-project is based on the idea that the arrival of the internet has opened up new possibilities to preserve your conceptual identity, and above all, make it relevant for future generations. Libraries full of diaries will not be read much. No matter how well sorted the bookshelves are, the parts you’d want to read would be pretty hard to find. The same goes for videos and photos. You would have to work your way through a lot of irrelevant information until you’d find what you were looking for. The internet, and especially search engines like Google, has tackled this problem partially. Finding pieces of information about people has become relatively easy, but finding out what kind of person somebody is, his or her views of life and ways of living, is almost impossible.

Virtual identities like they exist today in the form of blogs and other sites remain superficial, and above all, not very clarifying. Relevant information about people is often spread across many different web pages or hidden deep inside large amounts of text.

Live.on.line will make it possible to store large amounts information about almost every thinkable aspect of one’s life, in such a way that it can and will be found, now and in the future, by people to whom it is relevant.