This piece mentions that prior to the rise of printing and new systems of memory, information was preserved without critical thought about their value or ability to fit into a cohesive structure of beliefs, and that this changed as new tools for creating and storing information were created. Though this is a short piece and it isn’t central to the point made here, I wish there had been more of an effort to explain why this would have been the case beyond just data scarcity. I know that there are some theories about the diferences in consciousness and relationship to information in oral and literate cultures, such as those developed by Walter Ong, so my first thought here was that there may be an underlying reason to accept the value of any information written down. Choosing what is necessary to preserve and continue to pass on in a written form, rather than through spoken stories or other oral traditions, could be its own form of curation and judgement about the value of a work. It is difficult to know from the way the information is presented here.