The lost art of the letter

So, I'm working on a review of Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (which I will have for you tomorrow) and so much of it is based on the numerous letters that Georgiana wrote to her mother, her sister and her friends. This is the case with many biographies of people who lived long ago. We use their letters to learn about their lives: what they were thinking and feeling, what was happening, what life was like, etc. And I'm just thinking, how will future generations learn about our lives? Who writes letters anymore? When was the last time you wrote (with pen and paper) an actual letter that you stamped and put in the mail? (Thank-you notes to your grandmother don't count.) But an actual, wordy letter that describes what is going on in your life? Cheaper telephone rates make it so much easier to just pick up the phone and call someone. But most of my communications these days are by email, text, or instant message, and those are usually quick, 2-3 sentence messages that I don't even bother to punctuate. And while a physical letter can be saved for as long as the paper holds up, how will emails be saved? Is Google archiving every single email I send, so that 200 years from now some researcher will see the emails I sent to my husband asking if he fed the dog, or my girlfriends on where to eat dinner? Maybe this blog will still be floating around out there in Internet space. But if someone wants to know more about the person who wrote this blog, how will they find out? There's not much of a paper trail. With all the wonderful technology that we have at our disposal for communication, I worry about the permanence of our personal stories. Thoughts?