Seniors Search For Virtual Immortality

Hugh Pickens writes "Most ancestors from the distant past are, at best, names in the family records, leaving behind a few grainy photos, a death certificate or a record from Ellis Island. But J. Peder Zane writes that retirees today have the ability to leave a cradle-to-grave record of their lives so that 50, 100, even 500 years hence, people will be able to see how their forebears looked and moved, hear them speak, and learn about their aspirations and achievements. A growing number of gerontologists also recommend that persons in that ultimate stage should engage in the healthy and productive exercise of composing a Life Review. In response, a growing number of businesses and organizations have arisen to help people preserve and shape their legacy — a shift is helping to redefine the concept of history, as people suddenly have the tools and the desire to record the lives of almost everybody. The ancient problem that bedeviled historians — a lack of information about people's everyday lives — has been overcome. New devices and technologies are certain to further this immortality revolution as futurists are already imagining the day when people can have a virtual conversation with holograms of their ancestors that draw on digital legacies to reflect how the dead would have responded."

Comments

Re: Sounds alot like

[Runaway1956]

I dunno about that. How many file types from the 1970's are you unable to open today? We don't need to completely reverse engineer MS Office to get the data contained in the files, after all. Linux and Open Office manages to read them reasonably well.

I suspect that .doc files will be accessible for quite a long while, and that they can be converted to other formats before they are entirely obsoleted, and the emulators forgotten. Those that aren't converted probably have very little value to anyone.

Face it - if I sit down and make one of those silly things for posterity, my great-great-great grandchildren aren't going to bother with it more than once in their lives. Only when they are forced to by their mothers, I expect. Now, the Chinese, who have a greater respect for their ancestors might do so. Here in America? Phhhttt. (Yes, I am aware that ancestor worship has lost a lot of ground in much of Asia - still they have the heritage that we lack in that respect.)