Here’s my ten chosen songs from the Golden Record.. in ‘visual’ format to help display what was ‘gained and lost’.
This was tricky as I navigated the ideas presented by Abby Smith Rumsey -what can we afford to lose? (2017). I wanted to ensure that the musical selection represented various continents and their respective cultures, as well as a variety of languages. 10 songs isn’t quite enough space to represent the entire cultural musical history of Earth. I made it to the 9th song before I realized there wasn’t any English, so chuck Barry got a spot. Attempts were also made to maintain a balance of of genres, so I opted for a variety that included choirs, percussion, orchestras, jazz, as well as an acapella. Many of the songs I omitted were classical as I felt it was a little overrepresented on the golden record.
Something that stuck out to me this week was the fragility of the digital space. With the explosion of cloud computing we have a tendency to think of the digital world as this vast endless space where we can continue to data dump, and believe that this data is eternal. But, just as quickly as we can upload all of our thoughts, memories, images, and sounds, we can lose access to an account, or experience a wi-fi / power shortage. I’ve heard many cautionary tales of people uploading all their files to a hard-drive, only to find the data corrupted. It’s interesting to think about what will happen to all of our image files 50 to 100 or even 1000 years from now. As we move towards an increasingly digital culture, how will our collective memories and cultural artifacts be passed on?
Brown University. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital memory: What can we afford to lose?”.[Video]. YouTube.
Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why digitize?. Council on Library and Information Resources. Retrieved August 12, 2022.