Most of us don’t know much about our great-grandparents. Mormons probably know more than most people because of the emphasis on genealogy. But even Mormons don’t have access to much information about them. I’m doing some research on my great-grandfather Russell and his aunt, and even though they were both public figures for a while, there isn’t a lot of information about them, especially personal information. What there is consists of a few photographs, what they wrote, and what a few others wrote about them. But that absence of information is something that will be forever changed as a result of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of digital content the average person can now produce in a lifetime. 
Our descendants will have at their fingertips a deep digital archive of information that we created ourselves. That's one of the things the social media revolution means: most of us can easily produce, are producing, a digital legacy whether we intend to or not. The quantity of content we're producing, and technology's ability to make sense of it, continue to expand exponentially, so that, it will inevitably become possible to much more fully recreate our lives. For example, the average Facebook user shares 90 pieces of information per month, ranging from status updates, to photos, to videos, to links to a trail of the places they've been. Over the course of a lifetime, that's a tremendous amount of personal information and insight into how a person thinks, how they act, and whom they interact with, while all of that data is being indexed in the cloud. And social media, still just a decade old, will continue to evolve and offer far more robust ways of interacting and projecting ourselves digitally. If we take advantage of the digital tools that are blossoming all around us, our descendants can come to know us far better than we have been able to know our ancestors. I, for one, think that is wonderful.
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