COFMG INSIGHTS BRIEF
The Unintentional Archive
Caribbean Podcasting as Intangible Heritage, Digital Collection, and a Cultural Record at Risk
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Key Findings
A podcast is an archive, whether the creator thinks of it that way or not.
Caribbean podcasts capture cultural knowledge, language, and community self-documentation in a durable, retrievable, time-stamped form. They also preserve cultural exchanges from temporary digital platforms that disappear or evolve. The podcast is an archive, and in some cases, it is the only record that remains.
Most podcasters do not see their work as archival. That gap between what a podcast is and what a creator thinks it is determines whether the cultural record survives when the show ends.
The Caribbean Podcast Directory, built as a discovery tool, became an accidental archive. Its back end now holds unpublished entries for shows that have since 'podfaded,' preservin
This archive is precarious. It depends on hosting costs, digital diligence, infrastructure that is not equally available, and the understanding that digital does not mean permanent. The cost of maintaining a digital cultural archive falls disproportionately on independent creators who are already doing the work without institutional support.
We are in a post-truth environment where ‘seeing and hearing are no longer believing’. AI voice cloning and synthetic media are eroding trust in recorded content. This makes the work of authentic, human, community-witnessed cultural documentation more urgent, not less. Those of us still operat
Core Argument
Caribbean podcasts are archives whether creators recognize them as such or not, and because most don't, the cultural record they're building is disappearing at the same rate it's being created.
About the Author
Kerry-Ann Reid-Brown is the founder of Carry On Friends Media Group and host of the Carry On Friends podcast, one of the longest-running Caribbean-American podcasts since 2015. She is the creator of the Caribbean Diaspora Experience Model (CDEM), a six-lens model for understanding how Caribbean people navigate cultural identity in the diaspora, developed from over a decade of podcast conversations, patterns, and lived observation. Her own practice of reading and listening to the Jamaican New Testament in Patois is part of the lived evidence that informs this work.