What Happens To My Social Networking Self When I Die?

Emo Moment Ahead
Another death of the old year and the birth of the new one Happy New Year 2009! And I started thinking morbid thoughts. It could've been because I just watched "The GodFather" for the first time. The Don dies so swiftly towards the end.

But I started really thinking about all my profiles: MySpace, Facebook, SodaHead, my blog here; every website I've commented on, logged in, filled out information on. Though I'm still young, vibrant even, I wonder what will happen to my information when I die. Can I will that all those sites delete my accounts? And how would I go about that anyway? Am I permanently etched on the Internet, immortal in my young pictures? Are my friends with their dating profiles on Date.com or eHarmony, forever etched as whomever they were when they signed up? What if I forgot all the places I put my information? Or all those profiles that we made that weren't really "us." Or how would I will a profile that doesn't have my Real Name to shut down my profile for JadedTLC?

The only sure thing that I know, is that my web 1.0 sites will die without my credit cards. But Google or the Wayback Machine will hold a cache of them for some amount of time. It's a preponderance I hadn't really considered before. But as I age, it's something I may think about closing down. However, I can't know exactly when I'll die, so this does present some complications.

So the new year begins. Resolutions, so often broken as they're spoken, are there to be made. I don't know what mine are this year. I don't like to resolve to do things that I know will never happen, or be quickly dropped for new priorities. I just feel that growth sometimes happens so quickly that today, the who I want to be, will change six months from now. I wonder if that happens for anyone else.

In any event, I hope that the wayward reader who finds this post got something other than a wasted 120 seconds. I may resolve to write every day in this blog for the year. We'll see if I can keep my word.