Photo by George Clarke

You pull out your phone and text your friend to tell them the latest about your life, your significant other, how much homework you have. You log on to Facebook to update your status and upload some new pictures of you and your best friend. Then you turn on the TV or start your homework.

This is how most of us live our lives – heavily dependent on technology to convey our ideas, feeling and emotions. And while this works at the moment, here’s a difficult question: how will our great-grandchildren remember us?

A hundred years from now, our thousands of text messages and Facebook statuses will be long gone. In fact, our Facebook accounts will probably be long gone, too. Our pictures and “inside jokes” will no longer be remembered.

We can find our great grandparents’ journals and old recipe books. We can look at old pictures and laugh at the way they dressed. We can experience what life was like for the first inhabitants of our country based on the journals that they kept. What if we were responsible for keeping such a detailed record of our history? Aren’t we?

What are the chances that, based on our digital dependency, our great-grandchildren will ever find pictures of us lying in an old box in their attic? Unless, by some miracle, our digital cameras will still turn on and our pictures are miraculously saved hundreds of years in the future, they may never see how we lived.

Journals, like that of Anne Frank, have unlocked mysteries to the past and have given us information needed to learn from the past – and plan for the future. Who will our great-grandchildren look to, and how will they learn from the mistakes we made?