Nowadays, most of us are communicating using electronics rather than paper. If you’re communicating, you’re probably texting, emailing, tweeting, posting a status update on your social network of choice, blogging, and the list goes on. The Internet allows for so much more than banalities like online casino games. The question is how will we preserve all of this communication for the future? The past and its methods of communication have been preserved in various ways — cave writing, writing on papyrus, books and paper, and now the Internet. Communication has evolved and become much easier both to preserve and to engage in. We find ourselves in a new conundrum, communication is much easier and therefore a profundity of it exists, for now.
But how do we preserve texts, emails, and tweets? What is worth preserving and what is simply mundane drivel? These are serious issues. Think of the world’s great thinkers and inventors, its great musicians, artists, scientists and writers. We have insights into their lives and their thinking because they wrote letters or journals and diaries. We have these communications because people saw their value and kept them — in boxes, in drawers, in file cabinets, in a variety of places. But where do we ‘keep’ our communications? For most of us the answer is we don’t. We delete old emails, our texts and tweets are out there in the ether for a while, but they soon are lost. Nowadays nothing lasts and if we want to keep a record of our culture, our day to day lives, our communications with others, we are going to have to find a new way to save this data and see that it is worth saving. Some people still keep a journal of their lives, others might still write the occasional letter on real paper and send it in the mail, but this is becoming increasingly rare. Its imperative that we find a way to keep our electronic communication.