Yes, it's true. We're a "disposable society." But we regularly dispose of more than blenders, jeans, and laptops.
We clean out our "Sent" email files and neglect to print out our digital photos. Most of our personal information sits on our hard drives or on servers of password-protected internet companies, says Professor John Naughton in a recent article.
What we know about our great-grandparents and their parents is primarily gathered through old letters, photos, and diaries. But those tangible written communications from the past to the future have been replaced by the less-tangible — emails, Facebook posts, and blog entries.
What are we doing to ensure that our family's digital library is protected … when the computer crashes or we're no longer around to keep up our Facebook page.
Naughton writes about the importance of keeping a printed record of our online communications — or using a service like Entrustet to do the digital archiving for you. He says that we may be "carelessly or unwittingly — consigning the records of our lives to the digital shredder."
We clean out our "Sent" email files and neglect to print out our digital photos. Most of our personal information sits on our hard drives or on servers of password-protected internet companies, says Professor John Naughton in a recent article.
What we know about our great-grandparents and their parents is primarily gathered through old letters, photos, and diaries. But those tangible written communications from the past to the future have been replaced by the less-tangible — emails, Facebook posts, and blog entries.
What are we doing to ensure that our family's digital library is protected … when the computer crashes or we're no longer around to keep up our Facebook page.
Naughton writes about the importance of keeping a printed record of our online communications — or using a service like Entrustet to do the digital archiving for you. He says that we may be "carelessly or unwittingly — consigning the records of our lives to the digital shredder."
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