More than a decade ago, archivists and historians fretted about what would happen to the tell-tale details of everyday life - the scribblings in the margins of books, doodles in journals, folded and unfolded personal telegrams - that help social scientists reconstruct how our parents, grandparents and forebears led their lives.

It was already obvious that handwritten notes had been abandoned in favour of the temporary record produced by e-mail. Even worse, successive generations of software and computing technology meant that electronic records were being lost to planned mechanical obsolescence, not good old mould, water rot or poor filing.

Today, the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way thanks to cheap plentiful memory. A gig of memory (and rising!) in Gmail means you don’t delete your messages as quickly. Online sharing sites, like Flickr and YouTube, mean more data is being added to the public library every day (whether that data is valuable or not is subjective).

Terence Dick, writing in This Magazine, notes that YouTube may have some historical value (providing they don’t figure out a way to monetize the site and get bought out) :

” … The site’s success lies in how easy it is to make the most minor of experiences and events available to all. That convenience, however, threatens to change You Tube from an idealistic adventure in media democracy (“Broadcast yourself” is its current motto) to something much more utilitarian. … You Tube has become a message board for its users, home to in-jokes, personal letters and individual exchanges. Instead of minor masterpieces, videos are reduced to the level of Post-it notes.

… And while this might not make for compelling television, it makes for incredible anthropology. Nowhere else could you access such intimate moments in the everyday lives of strangers. Instead of their current catchphrase, the powers-that-be at You Tube might consider changing their motto to “Excavate yourself” and encourage their users to share something more authentic (and original) than their lip-synching tributes to pop stars.”Â

Still - YouTube the anthropological reference should learn from the experience of the movie Galaxy Quest: if your culture indiscriminately beams out thousands of hours of programming into the ether, you better hope someone out there has a really good TV Guide.