A Gift for My Children

Something of permanence amid our ephemeral digital lives

Have you noticed how quickly life moves? It’s nearly impossible to capture the totality of the daily and weekly cadence of updates we make digitally, and the clock keeps moving forward.

Currently, we create approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. That’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bites. And 90 percent of data that’s been created has occurred in the last two years.

Our digital musings are here one second, and gone in the next. It’s hard to keep track of your own content (even the stuff you maybe remember creating) when you try to search for it. Did I post that photo on Facebook? Or was it Twitter? No, wait — did I use Flickr? Or was it Photobucket? All of those bookmarks on del.icio.us? Gone.

The boards you create on Pinterest, the magazines you curate on Flipboard — even the blog you own and create — all of these will be a faded and forgotten part of your digital history, foggily known to you but completely nonexistent to your progeny.

At some level, we all want to be remembe…