Letters

I was watching this movie recently, called Letters from Iwo Jima. The last scene particularly struck me, where a bag of letters was excavated from the war site, the island of Iwo Jima. The letters were those written by the Japanese people living on the island, the soldiers, generals, and everyone else commissioned there in hope of saving their holy land from the American onslaught. The letters were those which were written but could not be sent. In the letters, they wrote to their families, friends, and close ones, about how they're living there. They talked about their daily lives and enquired about home. Now, what they wrote in their letters, may not have been something very dignified or newsworthy or of great importance to the rest of the world; most of them wouldn't probably have the grammar right. But 50-60 years from the war, when found in excavations, they certainly are instrumental and perhaps very reliable means to get a true picture of what it would be like, living a life of one of them.

And then a funny thought struck me. Lets assume an unlikely scenario where for some reason ,destruction strikes. In this age of computers, when most of us wont pick up a pen and a paper to write something, rather type it up instead, and lock it up somewhere, protected by passwords; write emails instead of letters, and blogs instead of diaries, is there something that would survive 100 years' time and be found by someone in the future to get an idea about how we lived/thought/felt/in our times ? Excavated hard disks, cds and laptops certainly wont seem to do the job. Internet accounts expire. And the servers, I am never sure how many of them would last and for how long; I assume that theoretically everyone of them is 'crashable'.

There are ways around it, I believe; but I wouldn't venture into that part.