Another excerpt from the interview with David McCullough from Yankee Magazine's Nov/Dec 2012 issue: "I think where history is going to suffer is that nobody writes letters anymore. And nobody keeps diaries anymore. Certainly nobody in public life keeps a diary anymore. They don't dare; they can be subpoenaed and used in court against them. So I don't know how future historians are going to write about is...I wouldn't be all that surprised if future historians don't have much about us to go on."
I've thought about that issue so often- how the written record of our lives and activities is so different than it was even in the 1970's and '80's. Will the e-mails and text messages of today be preserved into the future? Will our children's children have a written record of their parent's courtship? Their friendships? Something invaluable will be lost without those written records.....
And what about the visual record? With virtually all family snapshots taken digitally now, how will these treasures be archived, if at all? What will the visual record show about our family and social histories 200 years from now? Will there be much of one? Will these images even be accessible? How many of them will exist as prints? It makes me want to time travel into the future to see what the answers will be.