Digital and Physical Documents

I spent a chunk of this last weekend in a time-honored tradition: flipping through family photo albums with my mom. We have pictures-- real, physical pictures-- going all the way back to the 1950s... which, at times, seems like ancient history.

While I was feeling all nostalgic, I started thinking: what will my kids do when they want to see old pictures of me? Friend me on facebook? Double click on an old slideshow? And while physical documents have never been 100% safe (there is, after all, always the possibility they could burst into flames or be ruined in a flood or...), some sort of computer failure seems far more likely.

I guess it comes down to this: digital documents are easy to edit, easy to share, easy to store (my laptop takes up so much less space than dozens of old albums)... but also potentially easy to lose. And if we lose our photos, our letters, journals-- in short, all the bits of paper that mark our lives-- what will be left when we're gone?