Letters vs. Emails as Primary Sources

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.