Dead in the digital ditch?

Earlier in July I tweeted about the lack of digital footprints left behind by some people. Even for casual users of the Internet I find it simply amazing that a person can have virtually no indexable trace of themselves out there for the world to see.

As my tweet said… it makes me wonder if these people are dead. But, even then there’d most likely be some sort of obituary post from an online newspaper. So, that kind of shoots holes in that.

One of my friends works very hard at minimizing his digital footprint. He holds a high level university position and therefore doesn’t maintain any sort of social media profile or engage in any sort of traceable online activity. This I can understand.

The one that baffles me most is my friend Bruno (but not Bruno… I know where he is). Bruno and I performed as an acoustic duo named Leadmill in 1996-1997. Toward the end of 1997, he went through a “finding himself” stage, taking off to go to law school at Lewis and Clark for a year before dropping out and moving to Savannah, GA to “find his sound.”

The last I had heard from him was late 1999 when he emailed me with a Geocities site for the band he was in and made the announcement that they were off to LA to find their fortune. That was the last I heard of him or his band. There is no digital footprint for either. Vanished without a trace. Candidate for dead in a ditch somewhere? Likely.

There was one gap in the “hey, I wonder what X is up to (or is still alive)” Google search I conduct bi-anually that filled in over the weekend that came out of left field.

My ex-wife of 10 years ago made me a Facebook friend on Saturday.

Where once there was swirling, footprint-less digital sand, there is now a 24-hour convenience store of information at my disposal.

After getting over the “I don’t think I would have had the balls to do that” reaction to the befriending followed by the “holy shit, honey, you’d never guess who just added me as a Facebook friend!” exclamation I gave to Robin as she walked in the door from a shopping trip, I quickly realized it just represents another typical Facebook relation to me. It’s one profile I spent 30 minutes browsing through and then won’t have very much interaction with.

Sadly, that represents my real friendships as well. I need to work on that.