Cultural Artficats & shared Cultural Heritage

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Hello Student,
Thank you for using Brainmass. The solution below should get you started. I have given advice on this question before and I firmly believe that when it comes to modern cultural artefact, one of the better choices has something to do with humanity's need for archived information, knowledge and access to it. This is the reason why I chose to give you the solution below being that the cultural artefact in question is very much relevant to the present to just about everyone. When students ask me what do you think is a good cultural artefact for the present - I point to the likes of Wikipedia, Facebook and Google. I have always used the references I have listed on the topic when it comes to cultural artefacts and the history of Wikipedia - they are useful if you want to do further research. If you have any questions just let me know via the feedback section. Good luck with your studies and thank you very much for using Brainmass.

Sincerely,
OTA 105878/Xenia Jones
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Information & Knowledge Building - a Human Need

Across time, even in the time of the earliest man, our ancestors sought to know and learn about themselves and the world. The created language, gave meaning to their lives by naming themselves and everything around them - water, sky, plants, animals, fire. They also named certain phenomena (i.e. rain, time) and tried to explain them via metaphors of folklore and stories that have come down to us over the ages. Our ancestors used their minds and intellect to observe and then draw conclusions about their world in processes very similar to ours. This is not to say that the knowledge they built as a collective is right or wrong, this is just to say that they built and stored knowledge either as oral histories or as documented information in scrolls, in tablets, in stone or paper over time. Knowledge is power. Just as the early Bushmen of Australia painted the world they viewed on walls of caves during the Palaeolithic, the Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, Sumerians, Phoenicians, Vikings and Amerindians many thousand years later created their own alphabets to represent their complex languages to preserve their history, experience and stored knowledge as a people. Great civilizations had libraries and only those who were of a particular position in society were allowed to learn the knowledge from the libraries and from the teachers who were selected to learn them earlier on and teach the chosen knowledge put together by their ancestors over time. They are about everything and anything but they were ...