I'd disagree. As a High School teacher, one of the most difficult things to have student's appreciate is how history isn't a static or ancient thing, that they are a part of history.

The idea that primary sources are dying is poppycock, but I will admit that they will be harder to come by as they require more searching.

In this digital age, we have the internet. Two things come into mind, twitter and blogs. As this blog post here by the Library of Congress mentions, the need for researchers to have these things on hand is very important and on the cutting edge of historiography. I tell students that their tweets are literally being saved by the LoC and that some day a historian might go through their tweets to learn about the every day life of a teenager.

Second, we have blogs. I know my MySpace profile is still up, it hasn't been touched in years but it is still there. I never wrote long blog posts dripping with emo emotion but I know I have friends who did, and those posts will be up for as long as the servers stay up. Every blog is essentially a diary for both private and public consumption. Again, these are dependent on the servers staying alive and/or archiving services to pick up.

I would rather say that we are far more intimate now than with letters or diaries. Letters and diaries are composed with the thought of self reflection and higher education (until the late 1800s when mass literacy starts becoming common), they are sometimes written for the explicit statement of posterity and thus could be muddled with bias. A series of Twitter posts could say much more about a person's day to day life, what they live and want, what they do and say, how they say things and interact with the world, something not composed with serious historical posterity in mind (most of the time) but for public display of "this is who I am."

However, email and IM conversations are something that will be problematic. While email is generally going to stay around and is easy to store, it isn't easy to gain access to things and IM conversations aren't always stored. So that may be gone.

However, how is an IM conversation different than say the conversation books of Beethoven? What is less "intimate" or honest about a conversation over a letter or diary? There may be some bias in Doris Goodwin's thought which I would disagree with.

I don't buy it. I think this view that people no longer communicate through more "intimate" mediums which future historians will depend on is, for the most part, hogwash that really only shows Goodwin's and Colbert's views about contemporary society--namely, that people in today's world communicate superficially. Certainly, future historians are going to have to incorporate new forms of sources to gain an accurate picture of today's world (academics in the social sciences, for instance, are just now beginning to develop a methodology for using internet message boards as sources; historians should also be looking into this. Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites could also be of use to future historians). Moreover, the majority of today's historically relevant people (I know, a loaded phrase) still communicate through fairly conventional means that historians will have little problem looking at. Virtually any organization, whether a government agency or a grassroots social/political organization, still operates within a bureaucracy with all the paperwork that makes such organizations move.

Moreover, Goodwin is very much a historian of "great figures" in history, and I highly doubt the great figures of today will eschew the mediums traditionally exploited by historians. Virtually every US president, for instance, has maintained a personal diary, specifically for posterity. The US government has also already ensured that e-mail exchanges among government officials are archived for historical use. Any historian looking at government documents, at least in the U.S., has nothing to worry about.

Finally, it isn't that people today no longer use "intimate" mediums, it's that the mediums for intimate communication are changing, and during this transition its important for today's historians to recognize that they need to begin gaining access to and archiving these communications now for the benefit of future historians.

Given that when researching the early 21st century, historians will for the first time have a truly remarkable sample size of writing from a unprecedented number of people (literacy in general, social media, blogs, the internet archive), I believe the job will only get harder concerning sifting through that as well as preserving it.

Tumblr or reddit alone could be a source for hundreds upon hundreds of social and gender historians e.g.

I don't understand why anyone would think letters and diaries no longer exist. They still exist, they're simply in digital form, and in far, far greater numbers than before. If I wanted to, I could start a journal. There are several mediums by which I could do it, including audio recordings.

The difficulty future historians will have is dealing with the sheer volume of content that needs to be perused. Hundreds of millions, eventually billions of people, all producing their own bits of content. To a future historian or anthropologist, even the musings of a teenager on Twitter could have value.