Article Conversation #2: Digital Literacy Practices in the Cuban Blogosphere

In the "Introduction" to Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times, authors Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe, articulate the provisional terrain for a more inclusive and global approach to composition, one predicated on more fluid conceptualizations of digital literacy practices. The impetus for their project emerges from a call for more nuanced theories of digital literacy practices that speak to the increasingly globalized world in which we live in the 21st century and the sorts of intersectional, transnational, and hybrid identities that comprise life in this globalized world. This miasma of identities, perspectives, and subjectivities produce almost as many digital literacy practices, therefore destabilizing dominant, hegemonic, and more exclusive institutions of "literacy." Though we did not engage with the participants that the authors use to illustrate this paradigm, it is important to briefly note that these case studies consisted of writing, oral narratives, videos, etc. to help construct a more robust and complicated continuum of digital literacy practices.

I would like to put this paradigm into conversation with Rainer Rubira and Gisela Gil-Egui's article, "Political communication in the Cuban blogosphere: A case study of Generation Y." In the article, Rubira and Gil-Egui use the emergence of Yoani Sanchez's blog, "Generation Y," within the fraught socio-political landscape of 21st-century Communist Cuba, a landscape saddled by state surveillance, economic inequalities, and tenuous political conditions. Despite these obstacles, Yoani Sanchez's blog emerged in 2007 to worldwide recognition and fanfare. Though the authors of the article celebrate "Generation Y" as an important and potent site for exchanges of ideas about the past, present, and future socio-political trajectories of Cuba outside of the control and confines of state power, they also seem to denigrate the ways in which users--most of which are outside of Cuba-- actually navigate this unique and unbridled communicative space. Indeed, Rubira and Gil-Egui make important distinctions between expressive and deliberative forms of communication, distinctions that seem to compartmentalize approaches to political dialogue in such a way whereby exuberant and/or emotional dispositions fall short of a kind of "rational" yardstick that might prevent "Generation Y" from achieving the status of a more traditional civil or public sphere.

And that's the rub for me. It seems that while Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe locate their project in a call for more inclusivity within conceptualizations of digital literacy practices, Rubira and Gil-Egui articulate the legacy of "Generation Y" in terms of a deficit model, whereby the author and the blog's users are simply trying to keep up. I do not doubt that Rubira and Gil-Egui were intrigued by the liberatory potential of Yoani Sanchez's blog, but those aforementioned distinctions between expressive and deliberative forms of communication strike me as rather backhanded, almost as if lamenting, "If only those silly, emotional, and disorganized commies would be more rational, then maybe they wouldn't be in this mess." I guess what bothers me about such an approach is that it does not exhibit the sorts of sensitivities towards unique or alternative digital literacy practices that Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe seem so committed to in Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times. In this sense, Rubira and Gil-Egui were not nearly as accommodating of literacies in the plural, and not nearly as complementary of the obstacles that Sanchez navigated in order to create and maintain "Generation Y."