When future historians try to piece together social life in the twenty-first century, they won’t be combing through faded newspaper clippings or handwritten letters. They’ll be clicking through digital archives that have stored remnants of our real and virtual lives: email collections, tweets, Facebook messages, maybe even Google Calendar entries.
For the time being, preservation of these records is the burden of the user. If one chooses, they can download their Facebook archive or back-up their emails and photos, and maybe choose to share them with a scholar in the...