As social media is now ingrained into the strata of our daily activities - that is to share and post and share some more - a natural outcropping might be that parents of the digital age may stumble onto a new resource to bestow on their progeny.

Here's a nifty idea (or new tradition) for all of you new parents of the next gen, especially those of us armed with an arsenal of recording devices: The Parenting Thesis Project. Now that our pockets are likely primed for directing and producing blogs, video, podcasts, photos and the like; now that the culture honors those who post and keep posting; now that our Facebook friends are sick and tired of our "Mobile Uploads" album being solely for the benefit of our newborns and toddlers; now that even GPS locatios are tagged onto every one of our media outputs ... Well it's an environment ripe for not only recording our children's progress in the world - from start to empty nest - but also, for the diligent parent, a fantastic resource for your children in understanding themselves and your intentions for them.

A close friend and new father, @enri_zoltz, has decided to snap at least one photo-per-day of his newborn boy - especially in the same or similar pose. His goal after 365 photos over 18-years was to compose a time-lapse video of his boy growing from infant to young adult. This would be his Parenting Thesis Project.

Yours truly, has set up a blog for his daughter, where I post a missive to her about twice a month. My thesis is that by the time she finishes college, she'll have a handbook of the moments that led up to her adulthood (from my perspective). It would be a sort of tome or reference book for her to decipher my intentions in certain developmental matters like why it was important not to let her own a smartphone at the age of ten, or what lesson was meant to be learned when I didn't salvage her credit when she ruined it with shopping sprees in her teens. It'll be a manual for her, of sorts, about who she is and what significant moments might have shaped her as she matures. It will be a multimedia manual with pictures, photos, movies and original songs. And, in the meantime, the blog serves as a place where friends and relatives can order prints of slideshows posted there and watch videos that are too large to e-mail.

The Parenting Thesis takes devotion - at least 18-years of it, but nowadays the ease with which one can capture and share their lives, digitally archived for posterity, makes the endeavor not a matter of doing it - since we're doing it anyway - but more a matter of developing a repository to collect the multimedia research material. One generation ago, it was the thing of scrapbooks. Photos glued onto archival paper; ribbons and scribble-drawings littering boxes in the attic. Now that whole venture can be archived in the cloud, annotated, tagged, published, and even printed down the road.

And, if setting up a blog, twitter feed, Flickr, Youtube and such account seems overwhelming, you can check into a service like LIFEmee that just launched in September to keep track of your kid's progress. Tech Crunch has this to say about the service:

To recap, LIFEmee allows you to store, manage and share all significant aspects and events of your life: Your daily health condition, relationships, jobs, schools, possessions, hobbies, family members, pictures, notes etc. etc. The main idea is to give users a platform for organizing their lives online by collecting and structuring this kind of information for lifetime use. Users can not only review all data they fed into their "lifestream" (all data aligned along a time line) in retrospect but also lay out their plans for the future. The information can be shared or kept strictly private.

New parents I have met recently all seem to have concocted some sort of digital record-keeping for their family. It's as if the gestalt of the time calls for it.

Few might go the distance with their Thesis project, but doubtless we'll all children of the next gen will have a significant digital paper trail. Parents of the digital genration will probably still have access to the ones and zeros their creating in every "status update," and the only thing we don't know in this equation is if will be accessed from storage devices like, say, crystals.

I for one watched a DVD last week of my parent's attempt at archiving my birth and growth. They had digitized some High-8 footage - film - that they took of my brother and I's birth and growth into toddlers. The film strips were edifying while my father, now in his sixties made the voice-over commentary to the silent video feed. Cameras back then didn't encode an audio track on the cellulose.

At any rate, these are exciting times to be born in. Our Parenting Thesis tools might look archaic from our children's standpoint by the time they get to absorb it, but, it's likely that the tools that will be there to submit our thesis for review will be nothing short of doctoral material.

When bacteria talk, they cast their vote. And when their individual votes are numerous enough, they act, and they act in unison.

It's probably the holy grail of marketing to discover the precise mechanisms of viral videos and viral anything on the Internet, and if these erstwhile marketers had had any interest in their one and only biology course in college or any interest in biology whatsoever in the form of a TED talk, they might have gleaned from the primordial world a clue as to how individuals congregate into united action.

The nomenclature of Digg.com votes and the use of "viral" in viral videos, it would seem, is no accident.

Here's how it works on a microscopic level: the simple bacteria, in the average course of a work day, dispenses a chemical particular to its species into its environment. That chemical is identical to the one's that others of its like secrete. The purpose of this chemical is to merely announce to the world of bacteria like it, "I am here."

When enough of the bacteria are in close quarters secreting this chemical, the density of this, hormone or pheromone, as it were, says to all the bacteria to perform an action that their single-cell, one-and-only function dictates like becoming phosphorescent or to initiate their virulent attack on their much larger host - something no individual bacteria has hopes of doing alone.

The biologist's term for this activity is called the "Quorum Vote."

The human equivalent is called the "Digg."

The ramifications of a Digg being ascribed to a specific behavior or set of actions to be done when Digging gets to a certain level; that is to say, if Digging it not only pulls it to the top of the list, but also is a call for some sort of action, or product for that matter ....

Digg, at the end of the day - if as below, so above with our bacteria friends then the presumption is by our innovative advertiser or new-media periodical, that a threshold of diggs constitutes an action on the part of the producer of the content.

Bacterium, it's been understood thus far, were, as a phylum, independent, single-cell organisms whose function was merely to consume enough that mitosis would kick in and it could copy itself by splitting into two. That is, on its best day, the high school biology class would swoon with excitement at witnessing under a microscope the act of a ripe bacterium, fat with eating, decide that it was going to expand the scope of its singular DNA by making two of itself.

I suppose it's a strange model to pitch these days - that the audience for advertisements and news articles - could initiate collective activity spearheaded and organized by the agency producing the media, but in this enterprising age ... Anything's possible.

Part 2:

A co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, is vocal in his experience of seeing his simple concept - answering the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less - be used in innovative ways - in bacterial ways, if you will. While Twitter would on its surface seem to suggest that answering that question might yield rather banal offerings like "brushing my teeth," or "deciding on Newman's Own spaghetti sauce or Barilla," it would seem that when banal and ordinary individual are in extreme circumstances, the Tweet can, like the bacterial pheromone, unite individuals into common action.

One of the examples Williams cited were the Tweeters would announce gasoline prices they'd observed while driving around town. The utility of such reports by individual "cells," as it were, is evident when in fact the colony of Atlanta is, like everywhere else, suffering from the toxicity of the fueling-the-car-environment to their pocket book.

No doubt, the Tweets, like the bacterial chemical counterpart played a role in shaping the behavior of drivers of like mind, and perhaps opens an insight into means engineering collective behavior derived from the animal kingdom.

Time should reveal if there's a model to be uncovered through mechanisms such as Twitter. There might even be avenue for networks of tweeters united towards the same goal - especially if that goal happens to be, like in the bacterial realm, the mastery by individuals over a much larger, more complex and infinitely massive cultural trend or idea that no One Man Army could ever challenge alone.

Recently, Zarathustra came out of his cave, had a sudden shiver run down his spine; he yawned, and in the last hurrah of his expiration, he sighed, saying: "Circuit City is dead."

Shopping is at last in the hands of the people, he thought; no longer a dictum of the mega-conglomerate Gods, but dictated and shaped by the terrestrials: the user, the blogger, the five-starred volunteer reviewer.

And so, with this thought, Zarathustra walked down from his aerie towards the nearest village to spread the good news that commerce was now in their hands, and that by their own hands they destroyed the monolith of hegemony. Individuality was restored, he thought, and though the products - the manna - that the Gods of commerce would continue to shower on their target demographic with nifty electronics, at last, the marketing rested in the hands of an individual's personal story - their experience in the form of a review.


At last, he thought, shopping and trade were now the responsibility of the people and the villages, and he hastened to tell them of it.


The first villager he encountered scuttled out of a shopping frenzy of 30-percent off 30-percent that would make city pigeons lusty with envy that they no longer held the scavenging title for a while.


And when Zarathustra approached him, the feverish-eyed villager rushed passed carrying an oblonged box under his arm and looking like he had just gotten away with murder. He was hastening to stash his eBay auction before anyone noticed it was in his possession.


Zarathustra spoke: "Good man, what haveth you under your arm?"


The villager smiled with pride. "I just got the HP TouchSmart IQ816 for next to the price of dirt. You oughtta run to Circuit City before they run out."


"Are they going to forget how to make them, or will computers or even electricity to power them disappear," Zarathustra asked mildly.


"No, but Circuit City's gonna run out of them."


"Precisely!"


The villager frowned. "After that, dummy, we'll have to wait for Best Buy to liquidate before you can get your brand new wares at close-out. And if that happens, then you'll just be buying direct from manufacturers and distributors. No more playing with them in-store and getting the best deal online."


"Or buying them slightly used on eBay or reconditioned from the manufacturer," added Zarathustra.


"Right!"


"So what are you going to do with that one under your arm?"


"I'm going to flip it by posting it to eBay. Make a few bucks off of it."


Zarathustra began to get glassy-eyed and his soliloquy waxed with pathos. He began to unravel for the man the UberShopper - the one that buys direct from the manufacturer or from an outlet or from another, fellow villager for the best deal; and that the purchase is informed by his fellows who have used the product and his fellows who have reviewed the merchant. He unraveled the phenomena of price-at-cost of materials, labor, and delivery without the problems of overhead and marketing campaigns. He began to unravel the issue of The Long Tail, but he cut his soliloquy short because the villager walked away frustrated that this dude was saying nonsense, and he was forgetting, by the distraction, the description he had planned for his eBay posting.


Zarathustra watched the villager walk off huffing and puffing in dismay, and considered his discourse in a different way.