Info/Law

John Dickerson has a poignant article in Slate about his automated online research for a biography of his mother, the famous broadcast journalist Nancy Dickerson. (I know “poignant” and “Slate” rarely belong in the same sentence, but it’s true this one time.) Dickerson had a difficult relationship with his mother.  As the spiders on Google and eBay and elsewhere crawled the web on behalf of his research, they sent back constant fragments that were different from his memories and from the boxes of her papers and memorabilia that he was sorting:

The new data were almost always surprising, but what was most powerful was how they arrived. I’d never written a book before, but I’d written plenty of profiles. Doing so meant sitting down with my pile of books and papers and interview notes and following a thread until I’d forced it into squeaky shape like a balloon animal. You know what you’re looking for, or at least you know that you’re looking. You occupy a confined intellectual and physical space. But these alerts didn’t work like that. They were off fishing for me, and the minute they hooked something, they brought it back and served it up without a filter and on their own time. Since I carry a BlackBerry (or it carries me), they were with me on the ride to work or blinking just before I put out the bedside light.

Of course, this works better if your mother was a household name. But now all of us leave behind a digital trail that can be sniffed in the future. All of us on Info/Law worry about the costs of this permanent trail, most recently Tim’s musings here (the privacy tag has more). Surely this kind of virtual attic, storing not just our own mementoes of our lives but others’ intersecting stories as well, is one of the benefits.

Filed under: Digital Media, Internet & Society, Media, Privacy, Search Engines