The digital dark age

This article from New Scientist explores the grim possibility that our "information age" will be one big mystery to future generations.

People used to write letters, stuff notes and pictures into boxes and stash them in a drawer, keep piles of books and magazines under their beds. Undiscovered artists would fill their closets with masterpieces, struggling authors would keep stacks of early drafts. And when all of those people died, they left stuff behind for the next generation to discover. But that's all going away. Increasingly, we don't even send each other regular mail or even faxes anymore, it's all email. In the very near future (if it hasn't happened already), after your relatives die you won't be able to discover old family snapshots in the back of their closets, or love letters they wrote when they were 16. All of that stuff will just be little sparkles of data on a hard drive gathering dust someplace, in a format nobody has used for decades.

It sort of makes you feel better about those boxes of old papers and other junk in your garage, doesn't it?