Throughout history people have written love letters to each other as part of the courting process. The effect of these on what we know of our history goes well beyond establishing relationships. These letters give us glimpses into our history; they define personal views of individual hardship, ethics and morals, and the ideals surrounding relationships.
Modern technology is changing the way we court our new significant others. From online dating to instant messages, the bricks forming the foundations of our relationships are changing, and more importantly disappearing. Have you seen the commercial where the girl forgets her cell phone in her date's car and upon going back to retrieve it finds him in text-messaging his friends? Once that conversation is over, it's gone into the ether. (If you can't remember or haven't seen how it ends, he tells his friends he's falling for her, someone responds that he shouldn't trip, and then she walks away and trips falling right on her face.)
The same thing is true with emails. Throughout college I knew many people who conversed with members of the opposite sex throughout the courting process by email and instant message. Unless a conscious effort was made to save a message or two, they're gone.
This says nothing about the content. We could argue long and hard over whether or not the content of an email, quick and hastily typed out complete with spelling and grammatical mistakes is as meaningful as a letter, handwritten and perfected on a sheet of writing paper.
Why am I even mentioning this? Today on the subway, I saw a young couple speaking quietly, holding hands and smiling at each other. The young man reached into his bag and pulled out a CD that he had made, handing it to his female friend. I caught a quick glimpse of it as she reached into her bag for her CD player. It had the word 'luuuuuuvvvvv' wrapped around the hole in the middle and small quotes and dates on it in different places. We don't sing below someone’s window in the Oughts, we create mixed CD's so someone else can do it for us.
For me, I’m not convinced that all of this is bad, but I’m concerned over the losses that can occur. Will your children find an old hard drive in the attic full of elegant and loving messages to your wife?
Ether or no ether, I've found the shelf-life of these artifacts del amoure to be absolutely no longer than the relationship that grew them. I have exactly ZERO pictures of my ex-girlfriends. ZERO mix CDs. ZERO love poems. The emails? Trashed, and I didn't even have to recycle them. The only stuff that never seems to leave are things like birthdates and bra sizes.
But that's just me.
Ok. First off, I have a few pictures of ex-girlfriends, mostly from high school dances we attended together and such. I even have a few mementos, and quite possibly in a box somewhere even a note or two written during the boring parts of classes (and let's face it, there were a lot of those). You and I, my friend, being of the male persuasion, typically won't have a lot of this stuff. In the stuff that I've read, most of these artifacts are found in Grandma's attic, not Grandpa's.
Secondly, I think your comment on not even having to recycle them (email) brings up an interesting point: perhaps part of the reason they disappear is because it's so easy for them to. In a fit of rage, it takes two clicks to delete the emails and digital photos from a relationship (provided you've sorted them all into their own little folder).
I guess what scares me is that a lot of what we know about people from certain points in history (especially the further back you go) comes from letters that we've found (for example, in WW2 we had the correspondence between Churchill and Rosevelt). As more and more correspondence is broken down into smaller pieces that mean less and less by themselves (i.e. single IM messages), and those same pieces are more and more easily destroyed (close AIM, fry a harddrive), we'll need to find new ways to save our history other than through the lens of the media (movies, radio recordings, etc). Pheww... That was a long sentence...