Something odd just occurred to me out of the blue.
Now, Candice and I don’t want kids, but imagine a hypothetical couple online as much as we have been. IRC, LiveJournal, Usenet, flickr, and so on. That couple has kids. Ten years later or so, those kids will be able to search for what their parents wrote on the Internet before the kids were born!
Way too weird.
13 responses to “mommy, who’s Kibo?”
Great. You just told your inevitable future children that they were accidents. Nice going.
I can still find an Amazon Wishlist of a deceased friend.
Only if you tell them your user name!
i think it’s kind of creepy. everything is way too public now. :D
Oh, it’s evitable.
I once searched for my first name on Google, and my lj came up as the second link. This, despite the fact that I don’t link to it, nor mention my name in it, nor does anyone I know link to it with my name.
I’m dreading that revelation on Ali’s part. :P
I have mixed feelings on this thread.
On one hand, I tend to wonder about the determination of the childfree — if they do experience an accidental pregnancy, will they abort simply because children weren’t in their plans? Will they place for adoption? It’s a messy emotional situation to predict. Determining that you never plan to conceive is one thing — determining that you would definitively abort, barring severe medical issues etc. . . . seems a lot harder. Thus, saying that any child would never occur seems hard.
On the other hand, telling a mature adult that he and his wife will, of course, have kids seems arrogant and rude. People make their own choices, and if they’re not choosing to have kids, you can’t simply say, oh, whatever, you’ll change your mind later — how arrogant is that?
Bias disclaimer: I was born 17 years after my mother’s tubal ligation (after she’d had Irish quadruplets), and am a mother of two daughters, one adopted, one conceived with fertility medication. I’ve conceived and lost multiple pregnancies, and I’m not sure what I would have done with any of them wrt continuing or terminating, but the choices were made for me by genetic and hormonal chance.
That’s why I locked mine
My 10-year old daughter did a Google search for my name just two days ago. She thought it rather cool that she could find dear old dad on the ‘net.
:)
sambo
(yes, that sambo)
God forbid there should be two. :-)
*raises hand*
Yeah, Julia’s mommy and daddy met on #ireland, conducted an IRC/AIM relationship for almost five years before moving in together, and are currently sitting at respective computers down the hall from each other IMing while we conduct other online business.
Yeah, it is a little weird. Back when I had an internship at IBM, I had access to employee forums, and was browsing some old posts (it’s kinda like Usenet but running on VM, if that makes any sense.) I ran across some from my dad, from before I was born. I immediately searched for all his notes and read the old ones.
The bigger question is if your stuff will be archived/otherwise still around when your (hypothetical) children are old enough to search the Internet. My LJ posts aren’t around; a few IRC quotes and old Usenet posts are.