The Wikipedia and the Death of Archaeology
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For more than 200 years, moderns have sought to divine the life stories of the ancients through the practice of archaeology. Through such efforts, we can learn something about the everyday existence of not only those prehistorians that left no written descriptions of their daily lives at all, but also of our more recent forebears, who rarely saw fit to tell us what they ate for breakfast or which penny dreadfuls and broadsheets they liked to read.
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But surely we must know all we need to know about the post-Gutenberg era? Well, not really, as so little that may be of interest in the future seems to have much value in the moment to those that own it (the contents of your garbage can as you read this, for example). If such is the case, certainly there must be some better way to preserve the reality of everyday existence, thereby avoiding the necessity to use trowels and screens, laboratory analysis and intuition to recreate what has so recently been real?
In fact, there is.
Consider this: Given a sufficient amount of server space and the commitment to maintain it, a resource already exists that may represent, for almost all purposes, not only the death of archaeology, but also the opportunity to enable a greater depth and sophistication of anthropology than has ever before existed. So radical an innovation would this new anthropological methodology represent that it deserves its own name.
Call it Wikipediology. Full Story |
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