ABSTRACT
Study of cultural artefacts has been very much part of the traditional tools of trade of anthropologists and, more particularly, archaeologists. Such study has sought to illuminate aspects of the development of particular societies and cultures. Yet, the cultural lens has tended to be on the origins of Western civilization and on past and present times in so-called less developed societies of Asia, Latin America and Africa. There has been a relative neglect of critical studies of cultural artefacts in contemporary Western industrialized societies1. In this chapter an exploratory sampling is made of a number of broad categories of young people’s media artefacts in Australian society (see Table 8.1) and of what epistemological assumptions they may reveal about ‘the future’.
