The Sustainability of the Human Record

What happens in the year 12,021 when future generations seek to understand the extensive record of human endeavour, experience, and life, today and previously? What will constitute a future Rosetta Stone that makes accessible surviving monuments, texts, and languages of 2021; that ensures future people will know how to avoid the deadly nuclear dumps and climate breakdown created now? How can we seek to guarantee in the present that the technologies upon which we rely will be legible and accessible in even mere decades to come?This course will focus on the recording and preservation of, and access to, human communication through its long history and into the next century. How is communication created, produced, and received? How sustainable are the many media and devices through which it is transmitted? What are the key components to sustaining an understanding of the human record without which one might argue very little really matters?