Watching the repeat of Rachel Maddow. Wow she is ripping apart the State Department.

[frazzled]

8. I think you are well meaning too

But naive if you think the problem of digital archiving will be overcome shortly or that there is such a thing as a permanently stable storage medium. (And you perhaps forget that the National Archives has been storing paper for the past several hundred years.)

We don't know if the paper copies are merely an interim medium so that an optimal digital storage format can be made from them. We don't know squat frankly.

To me, the main problem with archiving today's multifarious communications is that a preponderance of tweets, texts, and even emails—even when you are doing serious business—are useless and/or redundant. In the old days, when you wrote something, it was laborious enough that you weren't going to send a letter that just said. "Fine, got it." Or "Cool." We generate way too much crap these days. I know. I just finished a project with an institution in Germany. The four months of emails exchanged between the eight or ten people involved are redundant (with all their cc'ing and responses), confusing, etc. For all the real content involved, there are a lot of "God, I hope we can meet this deadline" or "You are a saint" useless drivel. Thank goodness no one has to archive them.