This task was both fun and challenging. I enjoyed listening to a variety of musical pieces, although I kept wondering what criteria were guiding the people who selected those tracks. Inspired by Dr. Rumsey’s (1999) questions ‘What can we afford to lose?’ and “What would the people of the future want to know about us?’, my curated collection is an attempt to tell a story of diverse voices and rich multicultural past, to enlighten people of the future and help them build a better future.

When shortlisting the songs, I imagined the Golden Record traveling in time, not in space, so I focused my attention on the underrepresented cultures of the Global South (Whose Knowledge?, 2018). In a world where only 7% of the languages are represented online (Trancozo Treviño, 2020), digitizing media is a question of those cultures remaining in history. With our attention focusing more and more online, only the cultures with some digital representation can stay visible and make their voices heard (Smith, 1999). 

After highlighting all of the songs from the Global South, I made further choices by selecting songs “scattered among many locations” (Smith, 1999). It was important to me to include songs with human voices and languages in them, due to their capacity to add depth to the local context and tell a more complete story about the cultures. When two songs were from the same region, such as the two tracks from Peru, I eliminated the one with male voices in it, since male songs overpopulated the record anyways, and I wouldn’t want the people in the future to get an erroneous idea of our world lacking female representation. 

Of course, the resulting collection of 10 songs is by no means comprehensive, but it provides a variety of unique and multilingual songs that create a larger context in an attempt to decolonize the internet (Whose Knowledge?, 2018).

References:

Brown University. (2017). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?”

Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why Digitize? Retrieved June 15, 2019, from Council on Library and Information Resources website: https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80-2/

Trancozo Treviño, M. (2020, April 14). The many languages missing from the internet. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200414-the-many-lanuages-still-missing-from-the-internet

Whose Knowledge? (2018). Decolonizing the Internet. (Summary report). https://whoseknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/DTI-2018-Summary-Report.pdf