The 1939 New York World's Fair

The 1939 New York World's Fair was notable for an event that was intended to provide a cultural artifact for future generations to study a time capsule was created and buried at the site for discovery by future generations ("Time Capsule"). The capsule contained individual cultural artifacts that were thought to exemplify the culture at the time, such as a spool of thread, a doll, a vial of food crop seeds, a microscope, and microfilm spools bearing the contents of a Sears and Roebuck catalog, a dictionary, an almanac, and other texts ("Time Capsule"). Even an RKO PathT Pictures newsreel was included ("Time Capsule"). The planners of this event hoped to communicate through the careful choice of artifacts inside the capsule a type of conceptual model of our culture that could be "read" through these objects. This ceremonial act belies a truth expressed eloquently many years later by Ward Goodenough, one of the spokesmen for the "new ethnography:"

It is obviously impossible to describe a culture properly simply by describing behavior, or social, economic, and ceremonial events and arrangements as observed material phenomena. What is required is to construct a theory of the conceptual models which they represent and of which they are artifacts (Kavanaugh).

In much the same way today, we can take a reading on our culture by studying the artifacts that characterize it. One such artifact is the ubiquitous digital camera. While cameras have been

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Category: Arts - T