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>At times, it's incredibly depressing to me this is the case. How will people know about the human race if our entire culture is wrapped up in bits and bytes and discarded without a thought to their permanence? It will as though we never existed.

You may want to talk to Jason Scott or other Internet Archivers. (He mostly goes from physical to digital, but I'm sure this subject would interest him.) In the meantime have some links:

http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3613

The same way we know of ancient civilizations.

They'll uncover warehouses full of old government forms and shipping records, and use them to draw conclusions about how we lived.

That may be both curse and blessing. I wouldn't want future civilizations to think of me basing on comments on Youtube and Reddit. I have faith the things of actual worth will persist. There's not a lot of them, but that's always so. See Sturgeon's law.