The Future of Looking Back
What will we leave behind in this new digital age? As digital technology takes an ever-increasing role in our lives, one question is how we’ll manage our collections after we’re gone. What takes the place of shoeboxes full of pictures and dog-eared record albums? Get an inside look at Microsoft researcher Richard Banks’s thinking about how we might manage the digital artifacts and content we’re creating now—and how we might pass on or inherit these kinds of items in the future.
The Future of Looking Back
Most of us possess physical objects or heirlooms which connect us to our past and which provoke us to think about how we may someday pass on our own treasured objects to those we care about. Increasingly, though, the traces of our lives are made manifest in the digital world. Some collections of digital data we may deliberately amass, but others are simply the result of the digital footprint we inevitably and often inadvertently leave behind us in the online world. The move to the cloud exacerbates this fact, and raises all kinds of profound questions when we begin to think about the digital legacy we are creating not just for ourselves but for future generations. Some of the questions are technical and involve issues…