Blogs, email, and the loss of personal history?

We have entered the "Web 2.0" world. People are using email to replace letter writing (faster, easier, no stamp cost, no mailing hassle) and blogs to replace diaries. But I read a post today and I wondered if we are not losing something in the process. Recently, I listened to the audiobook version of Galileo's Daughter : A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel. A primary source for the book was the letters written by his daughter to Galileo. We only have one side of the conversation, as Sobel laments, because the daughter was in a nunnery and the Mother Superior had Galileo's letters destroyed upon the daughter's death. I was struck both by the great value of the letters we have and a saddness that we could not directly read Galileo's letters and learn from them.

We have letters from soldiers in the Revolutionary and Civil wars, as well as hunderds of other wars and events throughout history. We have journals, diaries and other writings from both great leaders and common citizens. They are a rich source of information into the events of history and how our ancestors responded to and were shaped by those events.

Here is an interesting article to ponder with the US memorial day fresh in our minds:

"HANOI A lost wartime diary by a female doctor that tells of love, loneliness and death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail has become a best seller in Vietnam, bringing the war alive for a new generation of readers.

The journey of the diary itself has given it a special postwar symbolism for people here. It was returned to her family just last year by a former American soldier who recovered it after she died on the battlefield in 1970.

The writer, Dr. Dang Thuy Tram, was killed at the age of 27 in an American assault after serving in a war zone clinic for more than three years. Among her intertwining passions are her longing for a lost lover and her longing to join the Communist Party.

This combination of revolutionary fervor and the vulnerabilities and self-doubts of a too-sensitive young woman might be called ideology with a human face, reminding readers that it was people like them, trapped in a moment of history, who died on their behalf."

And

"In the evenings that followed, Hieu, his translator, read passages to him from the small book with its brown cardboard covers and, Whitehurst said, 'Human to human, I fell in love with her.'"

link

Will this generation come to regret (or be denounced by future generations) for failing to leave lasting rememberances of their lives?