Anecdote: On of the best friends of my oldest daughter moved to a new rented flat recently. When I saw the address for a playdate, I recognised it and said to my daughter "I think you went to a birthday party at this address when you were 3-5 years old when another of your friends must have lived here". To corroborate this, I looked up the calendar on my phone, where I'm pretty organised about putting dates and locations of events. However, at that point I discovered that Google Calendar only keeps 2 years of history!
So modern technology is literally erasing our pasts. Not just calendar entries, but messaging systems (people used to keep handwritten letters for decades), and possibly even photos (if we're not careful about preserving them).
Edit: See my clarification of the 2 years in comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084620 below. I still think the point remains - we do not own or value our digital data in the same way as physical objects, and there is a much heightened risk of that data disappearing as a result, either by the owners of the platforms the data is stored on archiving the data or by us not valuing it enough to preserve exports and backups through long periods of time.
So modern technology is literally erasing our pasts. Not just calendar entries, but messaging systems (people used to keep handwritten letters for decades), and possibly even photos (if we're not careful about preserving them).
Edit: See my clarification of the 2 years in comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084620 below. I still think the point remains - we do not own or value our digital data in the same way as physical objects, and there is a much heightened risk of that data disappearing as a result, either by the owners of the platforms the data is stored on archiving the data or by us not valuing it enough to preserve exports and backups through long periods of time.