Our Contribution to History - Disappearing?

I read an interesting article in The New Yorker, appropriately entitled, "Oral History." The piece shares how Columbia University's oral-history archive was founded by a historian who was worried that people weren't writing enough down - because of telephone use. People weren't writing letters like they used to, and these letters had also served as important documentation for historians.

Allan Nevins, the historian mentioned, would absolutely roll over now - with use of e-mail, Twitter (used to announce such important trivia as Beyonce's pregnancy and Osama bin Laden's death), Facebook, texting, telephone calls (much increased with the immediacy of cell phones) - any documentation that survives the delete key would be nearly impossible to track down, unless of course you were on the appropriate Twitter channels and had the right "friends."

Are we losing history? Is the documentation still accessible? I think Ian Parker (author of The New Yorker piece) makes a great point. Not that we need to know exactly where and when Beyonce announced her pregnancy, and surely bin Laden's death was recorded elsewhere - in TIME Magazine if nowhere else, but what else is lost. Family history for sure. Letters were once a great source to help family historians piece together facts important to them.

Coincidentally, I'm reading a purely fictional account of a woman tracking down the happenings of her ancestors, which surprisingly included a Sioux Indian woman. A missing piece of the puzzle was found in an oral history library in South Dakota. If not for that, she would have hit a brick wall.

So, oral history is great! But .... who is recording these now? I'm not against new technology, or social media. Quite the contrary. I merely support our descendants' right to know what happened to their ancestors. I'm sure points of history important to the world will be recorded by "someone, somewhere," but what of the trivial, the mundane - that will be so important to persons trying at some point to trace their roots? I'd like to think many of us are keeping journals with these most important tidbits. But if my rate of record-keeping is any indication, we're not meeting this important need.