Break text free

The world of text is in an interesting place. Books are more accessible than ever (in terms of availability and format), yet most of our text-based communication is becoming more and more inaccessible.

The book “ The Future of Text “ unpacks this, and shares their view of things (from a few years ago):

“ This future must indeed transcend platforms, and break text free of 2020’s proprietary binds and binaries: the boxes that seek to confine text to different ecosystems, that couch visible text into endless, unreadable metadata, that make text unreadable outside of predefined tools. In 2020, text frustrates and eludes us: uneditable PDFs; unwatchable Flash poetry; difficult to export social media data; abruptly canceled Twitter bots, existing only in archives or not at all. “

The primary source where I’m posting this is on my website via WordPress, so that I fully own and control the text. However, you might be reading this on LinkedIn or Substack or some other platform. They can be great, but the odds of being able to find this post in 10 years on either of those is not good like the LinkedIn post from my friend Chris that I could’t find less than 18 months after she first shared it.

The book shares more about what that really means:

“ Passive deaths of texts on similar platforms take their texts with them: from the 2017 closure of locative discussion site Yik Yak, to the 2015 death of Facebook-esque Friendster, to the many smaller communities whose deaths go unremarked, text is…