Pre-Digital Footprint

In one of my roles at work, I serve as a mentor to a group of students that are challenged to think about issues of character. This semester's focus is on technology and character, with a close eye on social media. This week, students were asked two questions:

1. What is your digital footprint? In other words, where have you left significant digital traces online?
2. What picture would this paint of you? Do you feel this would be an accurate representation of your "self"?

Although I usually don't respond to these online, these provoked the following response. 
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I have this box in my house. It's filled with hundreds of old black and white photos from my grandparents, some as far back as their newlywed days. I've flipped through the photos more times than I can count. These discussion questions of digital footprint have my thoughts drifting back to when they were young. What footprint did they leave behind?

If I went digging, and I mean really intensely digging, I bet I could find published, public records of these two grandparents. Their birth, marriage, death records. Major purchases. Their number listed in the phone book. Their address in the church directory. Perhaps my papa's business got some local press in the paper. They were not invisible. Their existence left a footprint in the world.

And that box of photos is filled with the happiest of memories. Their first house together. Dinner parties. A new baby. Vacations. All with perfect hair and clean rooms and pretty dresses and happy people. The documented portions of their lives were by no means accurate representation of the lives they lived. They had to have had bad hair days and naughty kids and years where the money didn't allow them to take trips.

So what's the difference? Sure, the medium is different. I couldn't really Google them, per se, like you could Google me. My photos, looking just as put together and accomplished and well traveled as theirs did, aren't in a box. They're in a cloud. My records aren't buried on microfiche. They're floating about it bits and bites online.

The most significant difference as far as I can tell is how the information is transmitted. How and how far. The photos in the box only get seen by the people I show them to. My photos get seen by anyone with adequate Googling ability. Their address was in the church directory. Mine can be found on whitepages.com. When one of them needed to call their second cousin's husband Morty, who picked up Grandma's scarf at a family reunion, they simply asked their sister, who called her cousin, who looked in a notebook, and found Morty's number. If my second cousin Amber picks up my scarf at a reunion, I simply search her name and town to come up with her number. If an employer wanted to know what Grandma was really like before giving her the job at the meat processing plant where she once worked, he called a reference, and that's all he knew. Unless she was in the paper that week for reckless driving. Now, employers, like everyone else, Googles us, finds us on Facebook, looks for our tweets. 

Papa could have published an opinion piece in the paper every week if he wanted to. He could have showed their family photos to everyone who would have stopped to see them. He could have chosen an unlisted phone number or opt out of the church directory. They controlled the footprint that they left. And so do we. But for us, the options are far greater. The reach, much farther. The access, much easier. But we still control it.

I'm not opting out of Facebook anytime soon. My blog and other public displays of my existence on this earth will not be shut down either. These records I'm leaving behind aren't really bad or scary or dangerous. They're just new forms of old footprints. And just as I relish those happy black and white photos of my grandparents, I hope that the footprint I leave behind for my grandchildren brings them joy too. I don't want to be invisible in the world. I leave my footprint for the next generations. And in our world, that footprint just happens to be digital. Who knows what it will be for them.