I think whenever there's a new technology, there's passionate evangelists for that technology who believe it will create lasting, permanent change on society. I remember a lot of that growing up when the world wide web was increasingly becoming a normal part of people's lives. They'd taken for granted that uploaded files would always be available on the internet and that this would do away with the necessity of older information technologies. Now it's clear that copyright holders affect the dissemination of books and articles and the rest, that such things are not nearly as easily available as they were ten years ago, that people in practice do not save files faster than they are destroyed, and that books are actually a lot more durable than digital files because they at least have the decency to not dematerialize on you randomly. This is not to speak of the obsolescence of technology making it harder to access old things, like how you need emulators to play old games. A little extra inconvenience can go a long way toward encouraging people to forget about the past.
I think digital media is uniquely bad when it comes to information ephemerality in this case. Most people are familiar with the burning of the Library of Alexandria as an archetypal example of lost media, but fires happen occasionally while the web is always burning. It follows the words of Sir Thomas Browne:
But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.
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