Inheriting, Blogs, Cerno, Death And The Internet

Cerno is one of my favourite bloggers of all time.

I've frequently wondered why and have never come to a firm conclusion. There's the variety of flavours on his blog, from google Earth related posts to photographs of the graphics on Lankan buses and tri shaws. There's a sense of innovation about him that shines through his writing as well as the general feel and look of the Cernoblog.

He's funny too. Obviously not as funny as me, but he's up there with witticisms and little idiosyncratic lines that make me chuckle on a regular basis.

Perhaps the thing that's his biggest strength, is the way he so often inspires me. Not that he turns up at RD Towers and slaps me on the back in an American film sort of way and spurs me on when I'm feeling down and demotivated. To be honest Cerno's pretty crap at that sort of thing, he's never done it. Maybe if I gave him the address that might help him. I suspect not.

However, he does inspire me through his writing, as Cyndi Lauper said "girls just wanna have fun" "time after time".

His recent post here, about who will inherit our blogs when we die is one of the aforementioned inspirational ones. Oftentimes I have half formulated thoughts bouncing around in my head, but I only become consciously aware of them when I get the impetus from an outside source. That's what took place this time.

This blogging / Facebook / email age has created a vastly different backdrop compared to that which existed for people of my parents' generation and everyone before that, going back to when man was invented.

We, as part of our everyday lives, continually create records, diaries and logs of the way we live our lives. As a kid I remember watching Blue Peter, a childrens' magazine type of twice weekly TV programme that is still running.

Every once in a while they'd bury a time capsule. The idea was that it would contain examples of and information about the way we currently live. In hundreds of years time someone would dig it up and make amazing discoveries about 20th century man. Like those ologists do these days when they dig up Roman stuff and learn knowledge and stuff.

These days it's all different. In hundreds of years time I don't think there'll even be people seeking to find out about how we lived, they'll know it all already. It's a total paradigm shift but I reckon the subject of history will cease to exist, except in terms of looking back beyond our current era.

Our histories will be there for all to see, unless we've opted out. We blog, we Facebook and we email and it's all out there. Perhaps we exist in a Utopic mindset in which we reckon that because everything's password protected we'll be secure. Well that's got to be rubbish hasn't it?

Our lives are an open blog, our thoughts are there on Facebook and Twitter and our, whatever the opposite of ancestors is, will have total access to it all. I like the thought of this.

Back in the day there were famous old diarists like Java Jones Samuel Pepys and Darwin (the scientist not the scientist). They were fellows who chose to write diaries compared with the rest of the populace who didn't, well many couldn't read or write let alone choose to diarise. They opted in.

They chose to record events in a structured way. Today we take a far less structured, and far more comprehensive approach but a huge proportion of the population does it. Of course many people, particularly in parts of Wales, don't have internet access or a computer, but again, give it a couple of hundred years and that will all change.

I rather like the somewhat egotistical thought that in hundreds of years there might be some very great granchildren of mine who'll be writing in this very blog. I hope that they'll have more structure to their posts and that Blogger will have added the sexy moving tag cloud into its options. But I do think it will be cool to have generations of RDs writing here. Maybe there'll be future generations of DDs writing too, saying GM2U and all.

Often I look at blogs, particularly those of the much younger bloggers, and wonder if they'll regret publishing what they have done when they're older. I think I'm quite safe in the knowledge that I won't regret publishing the posts I've written as I only came to blogging so late in life. All that angsty and angry change the world and shout at people stuff that I had in my twenties has been replaced by a desire to still change the world, just by having a beer and talking, by intelligent debate and mutual respect.

Maybe you'll find me (del) e(a)ting my words but I think I'll be quite proud of my blog when I get old (er). Even now I'm embarrassed when I look at my early posts and see how I've sort of developed a style of writing. I make no claims for my writing abilities now but I look back at those humble beginnings and they seem like the scribblings of a ten year old child writing about what he did on his weekend compared with one of today's posts.

I'm quite proud though. I hope that someone reading these scribblings from start to finish might get a picture of me and the things I've been through and will go through. I hope that they'll get a picture of me and be a little bit proud, farts and all.

One of my less formulated thoughts is about wills. I've had fleeting ideas about letting Academic Bro know my current passwords just in case, but he can't be trusted really. He'd probably ruin LLD within a few hours.

It's a cert though.

Our blogs, our Facebook accounts, our emails and anything else to do with our online presence will be there for all to see in time to come.

What legacy will you leave?