The big thing people care about now in photography is how they can snap silly pictures of their friends at a drunken party. Don't get me wrong, those are great and I have many... but it doesn't satisfy the fact that jpeg is a compressed file and the compression algorithms can be lost in time.
I seriously doubt that... we live in a digital world where nothing is lost anymore. Granted, it may take some work for you to decode (or find a decoder) for a given file format (software), but the algorithm will never be lost. It is well documented, and available on the Internet, therefore if the need arises, someone can easily write a piece of software to decode it visualize, or write another piece of software to convert to a more "modern" format. Now, if the internet ever goes away.... then we are in trouble.
... but we have documents that are more than 2000 years old. There is no guarantee that we'll have our digital works 2000 years from now
Wait... what? So you are telling me that you would rather use a media format that is guaranteed not to to last over a couple of hundred of years (if that) over one that could easily last forever, or for as long as we can decode it (read:forever) ?
I will grant you that taking your film to professional labs will greatly increase the longevity of your pictures, along with the cost of getting them processed, but even those labs have quotas to meet, and will cut corners when they are overloaded. This is coming from someone who used to work in a professional photo lab in college, so yes, you can take my word for it.
Now, let's assume that you have a great professional photo lab, which you can afford, and use NASA-like technology to process your film to make sure the water is pure and all chemicals have been properly removed from your originals, and only employs professional photo processors. Can you guarantee that the place where you will store your originals will not degrade their quality? Most people can not. As a matter of fact, for the most part, people won't even keep their negatives after they get their prints done.
Now, granted, there is the whole disaster scenario. But do you truly believe that digital copies are more at risk of being lost due to disaster than hard copies? Also keep in mind that digital copies can be copied with no loss in quality, and stored in a safe place (backup facility for instance), while hard copies cannot be copied without loss of quality, and are a lot more expensive to both copy and keep in a safe (archival) facility.
I used to be a huge supporter of film, and fought digital for a long long time... but now I have two kids, and I worry about my family pictures a lot more than I used to. Also I like that I can shoot away hundreds of pictures not having to worry about: a) running out of film; b) cost of processing all those prints. As soon as I get home the pictures get copied from my notebook to my server and then replicated to a remote computer. My pictures are pretty much safe forever now, even though chances are no one other than my wife and I (and our parents) will ever care to look at them and they will probably end up lost in cyber-space one day after we are gone.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
