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Any information created by humans is part of our "culture". You may consider it of no value, but someone else may beg to differ. I went to a fantastic talk a f

by jll29 2y ago

Any information created by humans is part of our "culture". You may consider it of no value, but someone else may beg to differ. I went to a fantastic talk a few years ago at the British Library about digitizing a substantial quantity historic Australian newspapers. It was amazing to be able to read funeral announcements, product advertisements and other signals from the past showing us Australian culture from the 1800s. Since we leave much less behind in terms of physical assets (personal letters, postcards, personal diaries), we should at least aspire to archive more from the digital realm, or to future historians we'd look like a blank century.

dredmorbius 2y ago
You raise an interesting question: when is recorded knowledge actually cultural? What of the zettabytes of data which today are written but never read? (The old saw of a WORN drive: write once, read never, has never been more apt.) What of a knowledge that is the provenance of a single individual? A recipe, poem, memory, craft, even languages (which are being lost at the rate of several per year: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...>)? Maths at the PhD level has been described to me by several people as research which can be understood by only a literal handful of people, a full five if you're extraordinarily lucky. Is that knowledge cultural? I've put some thought into what it takes for a specific skill, art, craft, or technology to be considered "alive". This presumes not only current practitioners, but a new generation who will learn, practice, and pass on that knowledge. Possibly additionally the cultural infrastructure (schools, businesses, markets, etc.) which are necessary to support, sustain, and reward the practice. What's the threshold of truly cultural knowledge?

by jll29 2y ago

dredmorbius 2y ago

You raise an interesting question: when is recorded knowledge actually cultural? What of the zettabytes of data which today are written but never read? (The old saw of a WORN drive: write once, read never, has never been more apt.) What of a knowledge that is the provenance of a single individual? A recipe, poem, memory, craft, even languages (which are being lost at the rate of several per year: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...>)? Maths at the PhD level has been described to me by several people as research which can be understood by only a literal handful of people, a full five if you're extraordinarily lucky. Is that knowledge cultural? I've put some thought into what it takes for a specific skill, art, craft, or technology to be considered "alive". This presumes not only current practitioners, but a new generation who will learn, practice, and pass on that knowledge. Possibly additionally the cultural infrastructure (schools, businesses, markets, etc.) which are necessary to support, sustain, and reward the practice. What's the threshold of truly cultural knowledge?