A few years back, there was an interesting Chuck Klosterman article about cultural memory: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-will-hist

A few years back, there was an interesting Chuck Klosterman article about cultural memory: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-will-historians-of-the-future-remember.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-... > I imagine a college classroom in 300 years, in which a hip instructor is leading a tutorial filled with students. These students relate to rock music with no more fluency than they do the music of Mesopotamia: It’s a style they’ve learned to recognize, but just barely (and only because they’ve taken this specific class). Nobody in the room can name more than two rock songs, except the professor. He explains the sonic structure of rock, its origins, the way it served as cultural currency and how it shaped and defined three generations of a global superpower. He shows the class a photo, or perhaps a hologram, of an artist who has been intentionally selected to epitomize the entire concept. For these future students, that singular image defines what rock was. > So what’s the image?