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5. Digital Communities and the Pleasures of Technology
- Rutgers University Press
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t 5 DIGITAL COMMUNITIES AND THE PLEASURES OF TECHNOLOGY So much music coming through the vent—you think you’re in someone else’s apartment. Body reawakens by sun, physical contact, stick on cowbell. Cigar smoke. Inside of conga drum as storage. Clocks don’t work. Son. Cha cha cha. Bolero. Romántico. “Alitas de pollo” or “Fried chicken wings.” You have to be there to turn off the water when the cistern fills. Un café claro. Air, clarity, distance rushes from the sea. Ay mamá. —E-Poetry, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Territorio Libre A home television satellite dish, mounted on a makeshift skateboard, sits on the terrace of a home in the Nuevo Vedado district of Havana, ready for quick removal from the sight of thieves. This is not an illegal satellite antenna, as are so many throughout the city’s growing satellite television “market.” This home is licensed to receive the costly service as a benefit of the inhabitants’ work in the arts community. Not far from this location, however, a web of unruly cables links pirated satellite signals throughout the city, in an expanding private business that distributes satellite television into homes without the required permit. This type of circumvention of the Cuban government’s prohibition of home satellite dishes makes for many interesting anecdotal anti-Cuba news stories, and illustrates certain challenges for law enforcement. In 2003, a Miami news story for the local Univision Spanish news broadcast on Channel 23 interviewed an anonymous satellite hacker in Havana who revealed the ingenious branching maneuver needed to create a satellite delivery system. The signal, stemming from a single source, branches out through cables, routers, etc. that do not allow 156 DIGITAL DILEMMAS control of channel selection or time of viewing. For the privilege of connection and watching someone else’s viewing choice, he said, customers paid about ten dollars a month; in one instance, a single signal served fifty to sixty homes. These scattered satellite dishes are known colloquially as the “fourth network.” Police raids against the illegal network can fine users up to one thousand dollars. The reporter plays up this angle; Cubans, she says, are so desperate to see anything other than the government’s television network that they risk the steep fines to view television from Miami. Minidramas of domestic action by underground satellite and Internet users against prohibitions have become a part of everyday life in Cuba, and occur in tandem with efforts by the government to circumvent the restrictions of the U.S. embargo. Restricted and centralized, media consumption in Cuba occurs not only legally but illegally. This makes it difficult to study the patterns of digital expression springing up within the malleable contours of such practices as the satellite television “network.” Uneven, sometimes secret, often unpredictable viewing, surfing, blogging, and chatting provide at best a provisional snapshot of a larger social experience. My reading in this chapter of expressive space attempts to apprehend the myriad astonishing things that people do with digital media—and the ways that they do these. The electronically composed and published work by Buffalo, New York, poet and visual artist Loss Pequeño Glazier with which I have opened this chapter builds on the notion that “inscription is not simply about recording ideas but [is] about inscribing language in a specific medium.”1 Glazier sees meaning as partly determined by the material space in which that meaning is created. The result is that the “recorded text is not an ideal or definitive one but merely one articulation of many possible ones.”2 The Web-based electronic poem Territorio Libre alludes to a place, Cuba, through street sounds, images, and a Babylonian touch in its mixture of phrases in both Spanish and English. Multiple interpretations are possible, each based on the reader’s understanding of either or both languages, responses to sound and rhythm, speed of reading, and how many times the text is modified while reading. Capturing the piece at any moment gives it one of many possible, chance states of permanence. Its meanings are also contingent on the social and historical context. Greater, or even open, access to the Internet seems certain to occur in the next few years, despite Raul Castro’s warning on July 26, 2008 (during the annual celebration of the 1953 attack on Moncada Barracks that commemorates the beginning of the Cuban Revolution), that hardships in the [3.234.177.119] Project MUSE (2024...