It is axiomatic that it is much easier to find almost any information in the age of the Internet, thanks to the vast quantity of material that has been scanned and made available, and which is searchable through the likes of Google.

What is of concern, but only occasionally mentioned, is what we have lost.

The original manuscript of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol has recently been exhibited. The manuscript is covered in edits made in the great author’s own handwriting that give us insights into the way in which he worked and thought. We can look at early works like this by any number of famous authors: Mark Twain, Conan Doyle, Jane Austen. But what author, writing today, keeps earlier drafts? They go into electronic limbo, get deleted and lost forever. Will anyone in a hundred years be able to examine Ian McEwan’s work the way we can that of Dickens?

Take another example. I have just read a collected edition of letters written to T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia); by the likes of Winston Churchill, Ezra Pound and George Bernard Shaw. These letters provide wonderful insights into Lawrence’s character and thinking on a variety of issues, as well as fascinating revelations about the process of writing his great book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Flash forward eighty years. Would these letters have been written in the Internet age? Or would the correspondence have been sent via email? If so, would it still exist? Probably not. To the world’s great loss.

Because of the Internet, much of the process of human creativity is gone forever. If there is an answer to this, I have not seen it discussed. And what of human creativity itself? The Internet, and the forms of entertainment available via it, can be far more absorbing and consuming than television ever was. People have died while gaming, unable to tear themselves away from their computers to eat, drink or sleep. But how much is lost to the time people now spend lost in the World of Warcraft and its ilk, let alone IM-ing, downloading videos from Youtube and blogging the mind-numbingly boring minutiae of their daily lives. Time that would once have been spent writing, painting, learning a musical instrument or a language?  A serious concern? Or am I echoing the cry of my parents who once told me that I would get square eyes if I spent too much time in front of the television?

Intuitively, it might appear that loss of information in the internet age is less of a concern with respect to the law. We can now locate and retrieve cases and legislation more easily than at any time in the past. The same goes for government and legislative documents of all kinds. It is a trait of the profession; lawyers and government agencies tend to keep everything. Correspondence, even though compiled electronically, is usually kept, and stored digitally. As well as the end product, everything to do with the process of creating legislation, or conducting litigation, is retained. That said, how secure is this information? Richard Bortnick recently posted an interesting article on cloud computing which discusses the need to be cognizant of data corruption and other risks of electronic data storage.

It is interesting, if quite appalling, to muse, that post the Apocalypse, long-in-the-future archaeologists and anthropologists will write studies and hypothesize about our society based on the treasure troves they uncover of ancient legal documents. Oh, and our blogs and tweets