Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet | The Atlantic

So, maybe our times are not so different from previous eras. Lynch himself points out that “the rise of the telephone meant that there were a vast number of person-to-person calls that were never part of the record and that nobody expected to be.” Perhaps Facebook communications should fall into a similar bucket. For a while it seemed exciting and smart to archive everything that happened online because it seemed possible. But now that it might not actually be possible, maybe that’s okay.

“Is it terrible that not everything that happens right now will be remembered forever?” Seaver said. “Yeah, that’s crappy, but it’s historically quite the norm.”