Your photos, status updates and tweets will fascinate future historians. Will these online remains last forever? In this special report, newscientist.com editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury reports on life, loss, memory and forgetting in the Internet age.

It includes:

The fate of your online soul: We are the first people in history to create vast online records of our lives. How much of it will endure when we are gone?

Archaeology of the future: Future historians will want to study the birth of the Web using our digital trails — but how will they make sense of it all?

Amateur heroes of online heritage: It’ll take more than money alone to preserve today’s Internet pages for posterity.

Teaching the net to forget: We’ve begun to accept that the Internet cannot forget, but the power to change that has been in our hands for decades.

Note: To the list of “heroes of online heritage,” I would add Dr. Martine Rothblatt, whose Web-based Lifenaut.com and CyBeRev research projects allow anyone to create a free, ongoing backup of their mind. — Ed.