We are used to the world of internet communication as an ephemeral, “one-time” communication. Send your email or IM communication and it disappears, without a sound, into the ether. But at least some of those communications are permanently cached and indexed. We’re seeing this today in product placement and promotion, and in the future will likely see similar behavior with tweets, statuses, and emails. The internet is an Elephant with a long memory.
Take the 2006 Jones Soda Thanksgiving Pack as an example that may shed some light on our future consumption of personal communication. Jones creates a limited-edition soda pack every year to drive buzz. In the olden (pre-Internet, 20th century) days, marketers would create limited edition packages that most people might forget. The 6 pack of Thanksgiving Meal flavored sodas was one of a string of innovative and attention-getting soda packs from Jones that emphasized the Jones brand: irreverent, sugared (instead of corn-syrup sweetened, and fun). This was supposed to be a limited-time phenomenon. But almost three years later, the Jones Soda photograph referenced above and a blog post I made in early 2009 are some of my most widely hit posts/photos.
What’s the message to be gained? The internet is an Elephant with a cyclical memory. Search engines and site such as Flickr and Facebook allow consumers to show their support for limited editions, ask for cancelled products to be returned, and even (in the extreme case) campaign for fake products to be made real (think of “Email n’ Walk”, the iPhone app that started out as an April Fool’s joke. The web archive allows you to see cached versions of prior web sites and see the web as it was a few days, months, or years ago. Yet this “memory” or “nostalgia” is not easy to parse. Who published it? What was the original intent? These questions become less relevant when the content is separated from the original marketing campaign.
So what can we learn from the persistence of the Jones Soda Thanksgiving promotion? One-time promotions for products Jones are easy to find: the Internet makes it possible to search among user-generated content and official information. We should apply the same principles to the way that we find information about people and companies with whom we communicate. The ability to verify the communication as “authentic” and to build critical thinking abilities will be crucial in the future for users to validate these communications, improve the ability of marketers to get their message out in the blogosphere/real-time search world, and for consumers to find the products and services they want (not just the ones they find). What does that mean for the Internet Elephant? It will continue to remember, so ensure that the communications you’re placing out there in the world are ones you want it to share days, months, and years from now.
Information Maven 
I agree with you Greg. We need to educate young netizens that the impact the make on the world through online communication is a permanent one. Currently activities on Facebook and Twitter can be suppressed but as these services become critical to everyday life the information will begin to become more open and easily available.
I follow many users on the internet and I am surprised at the amount of freedom in which people share their thoughts and ideas. Both good and bad. I can’t help but wonder what will happen when these thoughts catch up with them after a unsuspecting son or daughter opens the wrong link and finds out what their parents have been saying about them in “private”.
Should be an interesting future for the youth.
It is concerning to have personal, potentially bothersome views on the internet but it’s also an interesting sociological event. Imagine being able to scrub through someone’s life online like you were viewing a movie. Seeing them as a teenager, college student, 20-30-40 something, kids, pets, birthdays, travels, retirement, reunions, births, death. It has its unnerving elements of information being taken out of context or from a different time in one’s life but it is amazing to think of the perspective you could get. Who they were, what they accomplished and how they changed. The privacy issues need to be addressed, but I’m fascinated by what we might learn.