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128 CHAPTER 5 Inhabiting the Digital Vernacular THE OLD TALKERS, THE CARIBLOGGERS, AND THE JAMETTES Hello Kevin I am Making a Email For You. I Love You. I Hope That You Are Fine. —Layla Browne, personal e-mail correspondence Nothing is more lively and more feminine than deviation. —Jane Sutton, “The Taming of the Polos/Polis” I’m going into Labor and Jamaica’s Prime Minister is speaking out for gay rights; #talkaboutmotherfuckingmiracles —@staceyannchin, Twitter post For Caribbean people, who have emerged collectively from a history of fragmentation and coalescence, the notion of a “virtual community” ought to be passé;1 at the very least, it ought to be fairly easy to conceive, if only because they have traditionally had to contend with presuppositions about their ability to cohere on a complex vernacular level while devising alternative means of expression to ensure that kind of activity. The way Caribbean users conceptualize and articulate their online activity thus relates closely to the frames and features they employ in everyday offline contexts. Relatedly, the texts they produce are undergirded with a familiar carnivalesque logic. Indeed, the operation of Caribbeanness online belongs among other oppositional consciousnesses that have provided what Chela Sandoval refers to as a “methodology of the oppressed.”2 Despite the obvious boundaries—the global, social, and democratic divides that are far too well known3 —Caribbean practitioners are nevertheless equipped to define and refine what they can do online, testing the elasticity of the borders they encounter to make space where their familiar discourses can flourish toward the gradual achievement of material ends. This is not to eschew the very real issue of Inhabiting the Digital Vernacular 129 limited access and de facto marginalization among whole populations but rather to investigate what those with access do and the degree to which their performances solidify the vernacular impulses I have previously discussed. As the Internet continues to open up to more varied communities, practitioners log on with their own varied traditions, mores, and sociolinguistic codes, bringing them to bear in a space where those identities can possibly flourish. Online, normative conceptions of traditional social practices are not only challenged but also redesigned according to evolving conceptions of Caribbeanness. Given a Caribbean cultural presence operating in this context, I wonder what kind of work this online activity can achieve, despite the persistent effects of marginalization that occur within mainstream technologies. For me, the overarching questions are the following: How do Caribbean people strategically apply the dynamics familiar to them (e.g., orality and masquing) while making more public use of mainstream technologies? Put another way, how do they allow themselves to evolve online while simultaneously resisting the tendency to be “conditioned” by the technologies at their disposal?4 How are Caribbean users able to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and “reply all” their way into a culturally, linguistically, and rhetorically indeterminate space without fully giving up what they hold fundamentally as their own culture, language, and rhetorical tradition? The answer is largely one of priority. With respect to the three genres I will examine—chatting, “cariblogging,” and video sharing—these activities are largely underwritten by a carnivalesque imperative, an impetus that compels the rhetors to attend primarily to achieving visibility in direct resistance to the experience of invisibility in what I call the “digital public” of cyberspace. This ontic activity involves the deliberate deployment of countermeasures that thrive on the indeterminacy of the medium and on the attendant opportunities rhetors have to perform their identities in those environments. For these rhetors, the digital public is limbo space where the materiality of pole and ground has been supplanted by virtual factors of “global surveillance and personal alienation.”5 Additionally, the resulting cybercultural activities serve as key demonstrations of rhetorical (re)invention among those who engage technology as part of an implicit inquiry concerning the Caribbean user’s desire for and participation in global citizenship, calling into question not merely who we are online but also where we could be and what we can do while there. My contention is not simply that technology allows Caribbean users to interconnect multimodally on various social levels, maintain contact over long physical distances, and share information relevant to the survival of cultural practice as a whole, though all these consequences certainly occur and can easily be observed in the abundance of culturally specific sites that represent specific islands or the region in general. We can see, for instance, that oral, literary, and [3.22.51.241] Project MUSE (2024...

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