I bought these from Frances Vintage Boutique $10.95 eachSometimes- well often-I wonder what will become of this generation's history. iPod, Kindle, digital cameras and phones that do everything but birth babies, have pretty much replaced the most telling of tangible artifacts: books, music and photographs.
I've recently returned to the land of academia where I am studying among other things, cultural anthropology. As I sift through texts, recordings and photos of people, places and articles of old, I can't help but wonder what all of these memory cards, chips and other landfill stock will say about us.
I scored the above books whilst browsing the endless supply of fun stuffs at Frances Vintage Boutique. I think they're a great way to tangibly catalog the history of my ever-evolving eclectic selection of indie film and music discoveries. What, if anything do you do to tangibly preserve the seemingly intangible relics of the present generation?
Peace and posterity
8 comments:
I still write letters, send postcards and read (actual) books...anything I can do "manually" I enjoy and I am trying to hang onto! Call me old school! :o)
I completely agree, Gina. I enjoy the convenience of my audiobooks when I'm working on jewelry or working out, but I love the feel, the smell, the everything about a good old heavy book!
Those are two pretty cool books you found. The perfect addictions to your life. I too, like to write letters, and I journal from time to time. I also still buy cds, lol. I have never downloaded an album from iTunes, not saying I never will, but I do love my cds.
I love when posts cause me to stop reading and start searching my brain. It's like we're having a conversation, but not...good stuff!
What I do to preserve the ways of old, is write. With pen. On paper. Often.
great post and question.
i'm a pen and paper letter writer, too. i write letters to people just because and also include a hand-written note in each package i ship out from etsy.
i've also gotta have tangible books, prefer actual newspapers, etc.
still gotta a few cassette tapes, too, if that counts. (though, there may be nothing to play them on before long!)
as a cultural historian, i have similar questions about storage media and the archive. 'doing' history will be such an altogether different intellectual undertaking in just 50 years: a proliferation of artifacts with no index or basis in the material world. i already live in my head too much as it is ;)
I think of this too, but from a different angle. Historians of the future will believe that beginning with this era, we all suddenly became more photogenic! There will be no images of people with eyes closed or caught in mid-sentence -- we have the luxury of deleting any photo where we don't look good!
On the downside, you're right... having a collection of "old family photos" is soon to be a thing of the past.
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