On Artifacts, Legacy Information, and Trust

I have been seeing a lot more conversations about how we don't usually own our media anymore and that everything has slid into a subscription model. Gone are the days of CDs (well I still have my massive collection from the 90s and early 2000s because once a DJ always a DJ), now we pay to listen to songs on demand. Folk are now more than ever returning to buying physical books instead of ebooks because if your ebook reader subscription system decides to go bankrupt, you still will have Wuthering Heights in your home. 

The idea of tangible media and tangible artifacts is something I think we don't chat about enough in accessibility space. There's a lot of assumption that some how digitizing a thing makes it more accessible and I think that actually comes from the conflation of access and accessibility. Sure it can give folk a bit more access to the thing, but is that pdf accessible to those who use screen readers, maybe not unless it is done with intention and awareness. In fact some folk may need a tangible hard copy of a text for classes or information because being on a screen too much creates bodymind strain. I am definitely one of those people who would prefer to read a book as a book, not something as a document on a screen.

I have been thinking a lot about this physical media and artifacts and accessibility and how that relates to social media. Social media by nature lives in the virtual ether. It all seems real and it is in some ways, the relationships we build with folk that we may have never met in real life and maybe eventually will meet at a conference (if it is accessible) or randomly at some other event. So much information is shared in these instances, links to resources, suggestions for books, suggestions for assessment designs. Twitter was that place for so many and it still is for many disabled folk where hop(p)ing from one platform to another brings user experience, and even in some instances financial privilege that they may not have. 

I think about this a lot. All the conversations, all the legacy links, some gone to link rot, but most gone because folk deactivated accounts and scrubbed everything. I am not a digital historian, but I am sure those folks have probably not slept well in the last couple of years thinking about all the information that has just disappeared. Gone. Like it never existed. Like those sharing spaces were nothing for a decade, and it's okay to hop onto another place and start creating more information and content that may in some ways again disappear at the whim of a CEO. I miss my old MySpace and random indie music tastes. 

I think about this a lot in relation to trust. We have so many conversations about "fake news" and lack of trust in traditional media sources. And my question back is okay, but do think that maybe one of the reasons why we can't trust those sources is because folk have no real problem just erasing the existence of those relationships and knowledge and information exchanges that happened for a decade. Nothing is real because nothing is real; all those artifacts and legacy content gone. All those relationships too? Like they never really mattered.

I love how in webinars or meetings when folk have their hand raised to say a thing and it has been there a while, the speaker will ask "do you have a question, or is that a legacy hand?" It's a moment of negotiation; do you want to engage with me, or has that moment passed? So how do we do the whole trust thing in an era of legacy hands and delete let me just get rid of a decade of information and links because of some guy? I mean I guess it is kind of like what is happening offline where folk just stop talking to each other, often because of some guy. Some guy who got elected, some guy who bought a means of communication, some guy who erased our networks. It is easy sometimes to blame some guy. 

I would love to stop hyperventilating on behalf of digital historians about all the information and data that now just simply does not exist, or if it does exist it is gatekept on a hard drive maybe, or maybe deleted next time someone decides to do a desktop icon clean-up. I mean I cannot be the only one thinking about this right? I cannot be the only one thinking of the ease of network ties being severed. Or maybe you are all having that conversation elsewhere, where I am not, where I will never be, because I can't, for reasons I can't really talk a lot about here because I can hear the spambots now. But some how I don't think you are. Because for some people it is a lot easier to press the delete button on something, when the information it contained didn't really mean survival or support for you, but it mean everything to a bunch of others you never really knew...but said you did.