My Artifact - The AM Radio

My artifact that represents an aspect of my identity is the AM Radio. Even though there are many AM radios still in use today, they are being fazed out of mainstream use. The aspect of the AM radio that appeals to me is the sports coverage, and sports talk that are still broadcast to anyone within signals range. I breath, dream, think, relate, and live sports; always have and I always will. The AM radio remains my number one companion driving in the car, while Ipods, and HD Radio and everything else are all the rage. The AM Radio may rate low on the future artifacts list when looking at the different things in our current culture when looked at the different disciplines of analyzing material culture.
Unless there are drastic social changes in the US and in the world I doubt that the AM radio will ever be looked at in social history as an artifact. The only possible social tie is the daytime talk radio that goes on politically discussing our current and future social issues, but I am fully confident that this has been mainstream replaced by the internet. Social change is enacted through much quicker and far reaching methods than AM radio today and in the future it is unlikely to revert back to this current Stone Age technology.
I feel that there would be very little interest in the field of Art History as well, as most of the first generation radios who received AM frequencies have likely already been salvaged and placed in museums across our material world. An example of this on a small scale is the museum that has a collection of AM (HAM) radios from the 1920’s through 1950’s at the included hyperlink.
I feel that future anthropologists may dive deep into the era where families sat around the AM radio after dinner to catch up on the “news” of their era. I feel that era will be compared with our recent decade of sitting in front of desktop computers and laptops to receive all of our information, as well as when TV’s first replaced radio’s as the standard form of entertainment. As we can see from an article in Forbes these types of comparisons are already being made.
The only way that I can see the vernacular approach to material culture being a part of the AM radio in the future, would be for the continued collection of those radios that people have made on their own, that do not come from a manufacturer. These homemade radios will likely become more and more a sought item as time goes on.
As we grow older in this rapidly changing society more of the items that we seek now will one day become “artifacts” and many of our kids will look at an Ipod as a very useless primitive piece of equipment. That is the nature of our constantly changing material culture and everything will one day be an artifact, whether it is mankind analyzing the object, or some other life form.