The digital tattoo

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n appearance, everything is ephemeral. Young people transmit their daily lives in real time, from the center of a small digital world that becomes obsolete with each new message they send, each post they publish, each witty comment they leave on social media, in perpetual flight from what happened two minutes ago.

Their eagerness, contrary to the aspirations humanity has had until now, is not enduring. The only things they engrave until death —with an intention that is actually also revocable— are tattoos. Without knowing, perhaps, that everything else is also recorded. Even if companies offer the option to delete it immediately.

Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated on the internet. Every hour, two million photos are uploaded to Instagram and twenty million tweets are launched. And while the global analysis of this data is the great challenge of the future, everyone's past floats in cyberspace. At first, we believed that what we wrote on Twitter would be as private and mischievous as graffiti on the door of a public restroom. That what was posted on Facebook replaced boring slide projections with friends to show us how the holidays were.

But the rules have changed. Privacy does not exist, and everything you say can be used against you. A friend pointed out that we should not talk about digital memory, but about digital tattoo. And the truth is that almost no one remembers all the outbursts, family photos, appreciations, and bad jokes that they once felt the need to share. Humans must be the only mammal that exhibits itself instead of camouflaging. Tweets and retweets have become that sin of youth that withered skins display. There is the mark of what we did in a fit, perhaps in jest, just to provoke. It can become a stigma. To what extent and for how long do we remain who we were?