These words will never touch the ground

I learned a useful word a few years ago: ephemera. It’s an art collector’s word, and it refers to manmade objects that were meant to be used a few times then discarded (streetcar tickets, movie posters, cigarette lighters…). It doesn’t include disposables which are considered memorable like stamps, clothing, or paper money. In recent decades, there has been a trend among collectors and historians to seek out and preserve this ephemera to give a candid glimpse at life in days gone by, before these inherently impermanent objects disappear.

I started to wonder what traces my own generation will inadvertently leave behind. In this “information age,” we all broadcast personal details of our lives (whether we like it or not) via e-mail, Facebook, cookies, blogs, forums, online shopping, e-petitions and membership forms, phishing, etc. etc. There is a mind-boggling reservoir of mundane information floating around. I’m careful to keep my privacy, but I just googled my name and got 140 different hits. Will any of this still exist 50 years from now? Will we ever see a museum exhibit “Amazon.com wish lists 2005-2010”?

Unlike traditional ephemera, electronic media requires careful maintenance and high energy and quickly becomes obsolete or unfashionable. With the disruptions of climate change and the decline of global energy supplies, there is no guarantee that this trillion gigabytes of information will continue to exist. Perhaps future historians will be left to comb through electronic flotsam like the Google search queries of August 2011, all MySpace profiles that start with “M”, the contents of individual computers, or all US e-mails with the word “bomb” in them.

Ironically, my generation will also bequeath a heavy legacy to the future—our ingeniously indestructible plastics, refrigerants, artificial sweeteners, etc., the steel and concrete bones of our cities, and the negative inheritance of an impoverished planet. Unlike the million whispers that make up our electronic personae, this legacy is more like a rolling thunder, a monolithic and overpowering sound that erases all beauty and individuality. Sometimes I worry that the beautiful things my generation creates will vanish with the end of the electronic age, leaving future generations to curse us for our selfishness and lack of aesthetics.