The past is not a foreign country. It is the ground beneath our feet, the water in our pipes, the cadence of our speech, the rocking chair in which we once rocked our children to sleep or enthralled with a story – and Barbados is in danger of throwing far too much of it in the skip. A holocaust of memory For 400 years, this rock has been a laboratory of empire, resistance and reinvention, yet we still move too fast to respect and understand our own history. When “Granny” dies, her rocking chair – a literal heirloom, crafted by Barbadian hands and polished by generations – too often goes to the dump, or the shipping container, to be copied and rebranded abroad as “British Caribbean” or “British Tropical” furniture and sold back to us at a premium. The same casual vandalism afflicts our sonic heritage: radio in Barbados is 90 years old, yet many, if not most of the crucial recordings that chronicled our passage from colony to democracy have been wiped, binned or simply mislai...
The Commonwealth's Big Three Broadcasters are investing heavily in their free streaming platforms: Clockwise from top right, BBC iPlayer , ABC iView , BBC Sounds and CBC | Gem threatens a gaping digital divide between these richest organisations in Commonwealth broadcasting and public broadcasters in the Caribbean, none of which has even switched over to digital terrestrial transmission much less developed viable, free, standalone streaming platforms. Across an ever-evolving media landscape, the winds of change are blowing stronger than ever. The Commonwealth's Big Three broadcasters - the BBC , CBC Canada , and Australia's ABC - have boldly declared their accelerated shift towards an all-digital realm, leaving behind the analogue era of long-wave (LW), shortwave (SW) medium-wave (MW/AM), and very high frequency (FM/VHF/UHF) radio and television transmissions over the next decade. Yet, nowhere is this challenge more apparent than in the Caribbean, where digital terrest...