"There is a very good chance that our battery-powered, digitized generation will be lost to the future. Most people have no idea how fragile our color photographs, our videos, our floppy disks are; how unlikely it is that what is not on paper will survive even a few decades. ... Our generation, communicating by cell phone, tapping out those terse little messages that pepper e-mails whose half-lives are numbered in minutes, may be lost to history entirely. Even printed out and preserved, these messages feel lifeless. My father wrote that day on paper that set the time and place and the mood. It located him, not just geographically, but within a family and a tradition."