Remembering in the digital age

2015 seems to be the year for remembering the past rather than looking to the future.  As I sit at my desk today it is 10 years since the terrible events of the London Bombings.  When I think about what I was doing then I realise that so much has changed in the last 10 years as to make my own life unrecognizable.

This time 10 years ago I was sitting on a sun-lounger in the South of France with my father and my 3 children.  My eldest son was supposed to be flying back on his own to Scotland to go to T-in the Park.  As the horror unfolded and we began the awful task of trying to find a friend and workmate who had been caught in the trauma, I realised that I could not, in all good faith, as a mother, let him get on a plane when there was such a high-state of alert.

I was lucky that day, we all were, the digital world allowed us to have the insight into what was going on.  My mobile phone worked overtime - using a network of contacts I was able to talk to a good friend, who worked with the top politicians of the day, and get his advice.  In the end it was the human angle that summed it all up when he said "if it was my child there is no way I would let him get on a flight this week."  Not that I needed this to make my decision but it helped us all to back-up what we already knew.

Without technology, and the global world we now live in, we would not have known about these horrific things until day old newspapers were delivered to the apartment, which would have been too late to stop him going.

In contrast to this awful memory are the much better ones.   I met my husband on the internet, and at 2.30 in the morning my youngest daughter got her amazing exam results, I get to see my grandchildren in the virtual realm every day and keeping in touch with friends around the world is done in an instant.

The digital age we are in is full of potential, for both good and bad - who knows what the future will bring us.  In all this though we should remember the past and learn from it - it would be naive to think that the world should only use the internet for good, but we should at least strive to make the world a better place as we are all now global citizens of a virtual planet.