Sci-Fi Vision

I had one of those artistic leaps that you have to jot down as a potential story plot/concept.

A friend of mine linked a news article about a man losing his memory after hitting his head.  It resulted in what they think may be one of the most extreme cases of memory loss ever recorded.  He lost everything before the bump.  He has been naturally struggling not just with remembering his family and friends, but literally who he is.

This sparked the question of "what would you do with a clean slate?" Which I didn't find all that interesting, but someone wrote back that they would check their Facebook site for all their contacts and things they wrote about or posted.  To them Facebook would provide a wide commentary on "who they were."  It was this thought that struck my brain.  That now, here in good old 2010, we may be seeing the very first fledgling digital personality archive... a concept that will grow over the next 100 years to ever more immersive and "real" snippets of our experiences in life. 

I've read sci-fi stories before that talked about you could "download" your consciousness to a new clone and thus be virtually immortal.  But I never quite connected that social networking sites (taken forward a few decades) might actually be the means by which we accomplish this.  We may publish ourselves in modified form.  Perhaps we can even re-program ourselves to kick those bad habits we don't like.  Our Super Facebook identities will be the true expression of who we wanted to be.  Our "site" would be filled with a life-time's worth of content and commentary.  Our families and ancestors could review our whole lives.  We won't need a programmer to "code" our personality... we'll do it ourselves.  While downloading to a different biological body my be a much farther ways off... it isn't too hard for me to imagine a rough AI of myself built around 50 years of blogs/facebook entries.  My great-great grandkids might get a chance to talk to me and ask my avatar what I liked, who I was in love with, what tasks I found most challenging at work, or any other thing I may a felt inclined to post or write about--assuming I have not downloaded to a clone or just uploaded to the Internet...