I type my grandfather's name (Harry Kahn) into Google and this great search engine returns almost nothing. He lived from 1912 until 2007 but Google has forgotten him. In the future, what if Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google had an agreement such that the cumulative data that a person has posted on these platforms could be aggregated and organized by date and subject. Of course, a person could limit whether his Amazon purchases of light bulbs in March 2017 are posted on line. A more interesting case is email. If I email my son in April 2017 and at the end of my life, I want this correspondence to be part of my archive, could my son block this? If people could post their own full Internet Autobiography, would this help friends and family to remember the person? An interesting selection issue would arise, who would post only photos of their life? Who would volunteer that their words and tweets also be bundled into the archive? As you think about your life and what you have revealed on the Internet, what would you want archived?
As an economist, I would also like to know how this new platform would be priced. Would tasteful ads be placed on these websites? So, my point here is that Internet cemeteries already exist but these Internet giants could create a much more meaningful and full portrait of each of our lives. Of course, different people spend different amounts of time on line and using these platforms. These platforms want you to spend 24 hours a day on these platforms.If people knew that their full life would be archived, would this affect their time allocation? How do we want to be remembered?