This article both combines and extends some of my favorite things to mull….
Archiving cultures – Mike Featherstone
coupled to concepts found in such texts as these:
“The archive fever is to attempt to return to the lived origin, the everyday experience, which is the source of the imperfect and distorted memories which are our archives and whose transience and forgetting makes us uncomfortable”
-Jacques derrida-
All my Words are Silent 
My fear is that with electronics doing it and allowing so much, the real cultural things will be lost. Though on the other hand that is the culture.>KB
You’ve changed your format. I like it!
It’s an interesting question… And how might we react to what we might today consider an unnatural exactness of detail around archival natures. NeverTheLess meaning, depth, authenticity, love, gratitude arise because they must, in spite of what we might postulate reviewing the current newsfeed, and these are what interpretations of culture are built upon. An addendum might be what should future cultures look like? … the place from which todays cultures will be reviewed.
Interpretations of culture (by whom?) are based on “meaning, depth, authenticity, love and gratitude”…are there not multiple interpretations of culture – “civilization” economy, event-orientation (history), and so on? I would love for culture to be defined by meaning, depth, authenticity and so on, but think that might be a slice of interpretive criteria? I’d love to hear a preliminary answer (by you) of what “SHOULD” future cultures look like? Again, my immediate response is more to predicate on trends and guess what they MIGHT look like given cultural elements of today’s culture…Whatever the complex combination of everything that continually formulates future culture (from which ours will be reviewed) – it seems important that we preserve ubiquitous artifacts whereby they can review? Wish I were near so we could trouble these things in dialogue 🙂 Thanks for commenting!
It definitely is a slice of interpretive criteria, but I think that the nature of the question precludes the possibility of any other kind of answer … No?
What we would consider important artifacts for the interpretation of us culturally … probably wont be, and rather like reviewing Incan vases, it will be some other component that we tossed, or like the Egyptians something that we never wanted revealed that will define us culturally from that future perspective.
Perhaps we should focus less on what to preserve for the future and more on what we should care about and how we should live now … change the trajectory of our “cultural elements of today”.
In the end my suspicion is that the things we care about will be our cultural eulogy … it’s what I hope … even if it turns out that what we care about is “dancing with the stars” and McDonalds there would be a kind of cosmic justice in that.
I would like for us to be closer too … it’s hard for me to dialogue without intimacy. Nice to chat with you though.