I've worried about this. While we can sift through hundred-year-old photos of our great grandparents, what will our great grandchildren sift through a hundred years from now? We generate more photos and written word by orders of magnitude, but often this data gets lost as we fail to back up data, social networks shut down, or we simply no longer have computers or software designed to view antiquated data. I guess what scares me is that our digital heritage is so easy to wipe out or at the very least, misplace.
There's a flip side, though: digital material is also easier to copy than physical material. This means copies are more likely to get made, which means it's less likely that the loss of any one copy will totally remove the material from the historical record.
And you won't have boxes of super-8 film in your basement slowly rotting because no one has the time to encode them to a digital media. My family has tons of super-8, VHS and simple photos which will, in all likelihood, rot into nothingness because no one will fish them out of the basement in time.
There are problems with digital media (e.g. easy to lose it all if you don't have a good backup scheme, or don't continually keep up with current formats). But its easier that physically copying old media.
