[gostsamo]

You'd be surprised from what is considered history. Nowadays, insights into the lives and emotions of ordinary people are considered invaluable tool in recreating the past: the context in which political, economical, and cultural developments happened. In fact, the spontaneous nature of certain artifacts makes them more valuable, because what we would call "official history" is always editorialized and subject to the influence of only few people and not produced by the entire society it originates from.

It is something that I've thought about - the contradiction between privacy and the need to communicate yourself to the generations to come and the broadcast into the void it requires. If your friend is okay with his privacy in the archives, he might be glad to know that in hundred years, there will be an AI whose PHD will be on the emotional significance of new technologies in the lives of early adopters of the Internet, the case of user John Smith 1988.

[arp242]

I think the biggest difference/problem is that these people are still alive in many cases, whereas the authors of historical letters are not. This is a big difference, I think.

[gostsamo]

O, yes, I agree. It would be ideal if peoples actions are like state archives (accessible 50 years after the fact). However, I wanted to underline how inconsequential people actually matter in history.