In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon often stated that "There is nothing new, all was seen before". I wonder if, as is presently thought, civilizations of the past, including Atlantis, Indian and Egyptian were highly advanced even by present standards. Could the sparse writings and history be just a bit more than some recorder's fantasy? Could they, like we, have developed too much of a digital dependance?
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Technology could mean that our lives are lost to history, according to experts.

As the way that we store information about ourselves develops, memories stored in files that use older technology are becoming harder to access, Dr Vinton "Vint" Cerf, vice president of Google, has warned.

That could mean that historians of the future are unable to learn about our lives, Cerf said. He compared the potential loss to the dark ages — the time after the Romans, about which little is known because there are few written records.

Cerf recommended that users make physical copies of important documents, so that they will last into the future.

"In our zeal to get excited about digitising we digitise photographs thinking it's going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong," he said. "I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out."

But even that might not work, since historians often don’t realise what the important documents of a time are until centuries after those that made them have died.

"Some people make the argument that the important stuff will be copied and put into new media and so why should we worry," Cerf said. "But historians will tell you that sometimes documents and transactions images and so on may turn out to have an importance which is not understood for hundreds of years. So failure to preserve them will cause us to lose our perspective."

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/digital-dark-age-could-leave-historians-with-no-records-of-the-21st-century-10043516.html