One of the books I’m reading for a class, Confederates in the Attic, is a travelogue of sorts, the author roving about in the South, talking to people and trying to learn about the Civil War. One of the women that the author speaks to studies letters from the war period, specifically letters that were sent between prisoners of war and women. Reading about her studying the letters made me ponder: in regards to source material which is of a personal nature, what will historians be studying in a few hundred years?
Speaking for myself, I can remember writing 2 letters within the past, say, 10 years; those were a couple of years ago when I was considering getting into a penpal thing. It didn’t go anywhere. Email has replaced the letter for me, and unless I’m way off the mark, it has done the same for millions of other people, too. For me and the people around me, the only time snail-mail is sent is around Christmas time, when holiday cards are sent out. The switch from paper letters to email will perhaps, in a few hundred years, lead to a curiosity: there won’t be any personal correspondence for historians to study.
Obviously, when people regularly corresponded via letters, their correspondence was in solid form. It was in a form that family members could store in a box after the receiver of the letters had died. How many of us have found a letter, two letters, a stack of letters in a dead family member’s dresser when cleaning it out? I have found a few, and my older family members have told me of finding large stashes of them.
On the flip side, how would you store email for a long period of time? Of course, printing it out is a possibility, but the only time I’ve ever found myself printing out an email was when it had directions in it that I needed to have on me while driving somewhere. Beyond that, all of my “correspondence” stays in my Gmail inbox - where it’s password protected from everyone but me. There’s nothing amazing in my inbox that I think would need to be shared, but suppose I died tomorrow. All of the emails I’ve received from family and friends would essentially be lost, just like that. No one would ever get into my account, and it would sit there until either A) Google went belly-up and Gmail died or B) Google decided that, after 20 years of inactivity, indeed, that user is gone. They’d scrap the account, free up the username, and that would be that.
Email isn’t the only “personal” primary source material that might simply disappear as technology changes (or breaks). I’m sure many people still keep bound journals, but I’m also sure that a huge percentage of journal keepers have leapt online. Will online journals that are in existence today still be floating around somewhere online in 300 years? Will there be a WayWayWayBack website? Or will millions of journals housed at, say, LiveJournal, just disappear in a century or so with the closing of Six Apart, a major hack attack, a massive datacenter fire?
With all of this, I’m not saying that paper correspondence and bound journals are necessarily better than their digital counterparts. Paper deteriorates, ink fades, libraries burn. Material sources are susceptible to destrution and loss just like digital sources. It does seem, however, that digital “stuff” has, relatively speaking, a much shorter existence in comparison to material stuff. I think we’ve all lost plenty of our favorite websites to the 404 void to realize that.
There is one positive to all of this, though. If all of our digitally based personal communications are lost to future historians, at least they won’t have to slog through billions of text messages, 160 characters or less, consisting of acronyms and bad spelling. 
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November 29, 2007 at 12:31 am
Joshua J. Slone
I’ve got to disagree with you. Now, I can’t give you an example of something digital surviving a century… but that’s because it hasn’t been able to yet. Will most people’s emails disappear? Sure, but so did most people’s real letters. Certainly we don’t still have the majority of soldiers’ letters to their family.
However, imagine that you had the foresight (and Google added the capability) so at some advanced age release your email from its account. Then a historian would probably have MUCH MUCH MORE content from you than they would from the average letter writer of yesteryear. Hell, their research will be that much easier because they’ll be able to search your email for specific words, or look for time periods near important events. When your family members found stashes, did they find a stash of 10,000 letters covering an entire life in indexed form?
As well, you already made a mention of archive.org. It’s imperfect, but reality has NO equivalent. If I want to view a site from 2003, there’s a good chance I can… if I’m willing to put up with a lot of broken images, and non-working portions that used Flash. However, if I want to visit a so-so version of my house from 2003, and to maybe look for something I knew I had in a drawer at that time? I’m pretty much screwed.
November 29, 2007 at 2:12 am
Tom
I disagree with Joshua about the digital thing being better for two reasons. Firstly, the reliability of digital storage media is a bust. Hard drives fail at rather high rates, archival CDs are rated for 50 years but tests have shown that they’re only good for 5. On top of that there’s the format issue. Word processors of today have difficulty with text files from just 6 or 7 years ago. I question how well preserved a hard drive would be if left in say… Nag Hammadi for 1500 years.
Secondly there’s the issue of cultural interaction with the digital/virtual world. How much information is actually conveyed in regular emails and texts. Probably not much whereas a letter from the days of old was simply packed with juicy bits. Though I certainly haven’t studied the information ratio I do know that nowhere today have I found anything rivaling Herodotus’ account of his trip to Egypt, Plutarch, Giraldus Cambrensis, etc etc. These persons wrote with such a painstaking attention to detail that has been lost these days because of how we perceive our technology is able to do our work for us. No one describes anything anymore, they just link to it, show a photo or simply forgo description. To a historian of the future, description is necessary to make any sense of anything and I question how present that is in our world today. Read any random blog you come across and tell me how much useful information you can find. I’m often left shaking my head in wonder. Of course not everyone is an author but most internet/digital writers are just plain lazy relying on context far too much. Context is something future historians won’t have.
November 29, 2007 at 9:56 am
Josh
@Joshua: The idea of people being able to “release” the emails from their accounts sometime in the distant future is an interesting one, but I’m not sure it’d work. The capability is there, easy, but… who’s going to actually do it? That is perhaps one thing that letters have over email: when the person dies, if the letters are stuffed in a drawer, the person has no say over the matter - which is exactly how we end up having romantic letters between Civil War POWs and women. I think that if, at the time of the writing / receiving of said letters, the peole were asked, “Hey, in 150 years, do you care if we let everyone read your letters?”, the answer would have been: “Yes, we do care, leaeve our stuff alone, these are personal!” I think that you would get a similar response from the vast majority of email writers of today. Granted, though, if some people agreed to it, certainly, it could work.
Regarding archive.org: Yeah, archive.org exists and you can go back quite a way, but will it be up and running in 50 years? 25 years? I’ve never looked into web archives much; are there any other services like archive.org?
About going back to your house in 2003… well, if you haven’t moved said item from said drawer, it should still be right where it was.
@Tom: Yeah, the reliability of digital storage is one of the big problems when looking at this issue. Your remark about archival CDs reminds me of a news story I saw a couple years ago. Some fellow had been really big into music CDs, and had bought thousands of the things, right around when they started getting popular. To avoid having them deteriorate from sunlight and what not, he had them put into storage. 15 years later he got them out and… they were all ruined. The material inside that was supposed to have lasted practically forever had rotted away. Oops.
I hadn’t thought about the problems of context at all; it’s a great point. As we’ve gotten used to being able to just fire off another email if we forgot something in the first one, we’ve gotten sloppy about being detailed in our communications. It works for us, but it won’t work for a historian who, when reading an email, is told to “click here” - which goes nowhere, of course. An email of one line saying “Yeah, let’s do that” will be totally useless unless the researcher has access to the initial email.
November 29, 2007 at 11:40 am
Joshua J. Slone
Blogging may not have many Herodotuses, but for every Herodotus of old there are 1000 people covering some topic from different points of view.
Will archive.org be around in its current form in 50 years? *shrug* But barring the odd legal challenge, I see no reason its database of information would disappear. We may not yet have a digital storage medium with the ease of survival of carved stone sitting in a dry cave, but barring some immense cataclysm the files will be backed up in multiple locations until there is something like that. And a cataclysm could do a pretty good job of ruining real-world archives, too.
December 3, 2007 at 10:30 am
Josh
Joshua: You know, the “odd legal challenge” thing brings up a good question: aren’t a lot of the websites that archive.org holds copyrighted? How does that work?
I think the ability to back stuff up with such ease is part of the problem. I’m not saying I don’t like the ability - quite the contrary - but I think it has led to people not really caring if there are any long term solutions to digital data storage. Why worry about a hard drive or CD that will last for a century when you can buy another hard drive for $40, or a blank CD for $.50?
December 3, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Joshua J. Slone
I checked Wikipedia, thinking they would have some information about lawsuits, but… nope. It does make a reference to sites being removed from the archive by the request of owners, though.