Born in Honduras, raised in the States, I’ve kept my ties strong with family. I’ve also been independently observing Honduras’ cultural adaptation to the internet since I was awarded the Vira Heinz Study Abroad Fellowship while studying at Carnegie Mellon ten years ago. Now, during this unfolding political situation, the internet’s role in Honduran’s lives has become an important means of expression, a reflection of the country to the world and the tenuous line connecting me to my loved ones.
Before the past 10 years, keeping in touch with Honduras was not easy. Due to the prohibitive cost of traveling or calling, many of us abroad infrequently saw or heard from family. So it’s emotionally revolutionary that today I can call VOIP my aunt, a senior with a cell phone and laptop, speak to her without a five second delay and hollow-tunnel acoustics, chat with my niece, or get photos of the weekend get-together by email are. We are that much closer, in the good and the bad.
I was fortunate to see first hand how these ties that bind were laid down. During my research trip there in 1995, I interviewed the Honduran Science and Technical Council (COHCIT) about connecting the country to the web via satellite, the Honduran Telephone Authority (HONDUTEL) about the obsolete copper wire telephone line infrastructure and the necessity of wireless communications, and talked to emergent, private internet service providers and technology education centers. Regardless of their industry or political position, those involved were very interested in getting Honduras wired. This was a monumental change for a country where not many are fortunate to finish basic education and an alarming chasm between rich and poor.
These cultural implications are what most impacted me and what I’ve been tracking since. In the early days of the web in Honduras, those who were already connected to the internet saw themselves as part of a global community. I spoke with a journalist who saw himself as evangelizer “of all things tech”, IT leaders at international banks who mentored younger computer geeks, and hackers who wanted to keep their identities secret but were willing to meet at the McDonald’s down the street from the presidential palace and share their exploits. Interestingly, these young programmers were surprised a woman was interested in this topic. But I was already observing that gender issues would quickly become. One of my favorite photographs I took then was of a woman on the computer, while her male colleague mopped.
In the last vestiges of macho office culture, Yolanda Rivas, who coined the term cyberspanglish, related to me that male managers in Latin America were leaving the computer work to their secretaries only because they knew how to type on these glorified typewriters. This opened doors for women in Latinamerica. The older computer models were replaced with faster, cheaper models that could connect online. It wasn’t long before Honduras had domestically assembled computers, internet cafes in even the most humble neighborhoods, streets ripped up to install fiber cables and people from all social levels texting each other by cell phones. This was the realization of my research analysis. Early on I had identified the digital divide that I foresaw would be overcome by a technological leapfrog jump into late adoption once the computers and telecommunications had become affordable to the masses using advanced technology that did not depend on old infrastructures.
The one bump in the road that I foresaw as a more stubborn obstacle in adopting technology is overcoming the cultural issues related to post-colonization. This is where the culture of user generated content and social networking to voice opinions on the Honduran political situation and the opinion making process by those in power are at a disconnect. This is where a real change could occur in creating or changing public opinion with political consequences. This is a no mans land.
It is accessible enough today for a Honduran to express their opinion about the political crisis by commenting in any open international or domestic newspapers’ forum online, to post their viewpoint via video editorial on youtube or respond to a call for citizen reporting via email from CNN en espanol in the US and watch on cable or satellite antenna. These expressions are creating a buzz, yet there is no clear message, nor someone to spin it. The current political crisis is a multifaceted issue online, laid out from each individual’s point of view. However in the mass media and in world politics, a quick analysis of what is right and wrong in for Honduran politics has been cast. Misinformed reporters are even calling it a Banana Republic, an outdated impression, not even the store by that same name has that same identity (I should know, I worked there too, and the irony was never lost on me).
It should be worth noting that Hondurans are using established channels to respond online to the politics, creating facebook groups, making active comments on new sites internationally, and listening to web streams from the Honduran radio stations and sending text messages read on air. A few are setting up blogs or doing digital photojournalism. The web right now is a public forum where people are identifying themselves and expressing their opinions publicly, which hopefully will never be used as documentation for persecution, regardless of the political outcome of the current situation.
Hondurans have caught on to the web, and the web has caught their viewpoints. Yet, despite the access to the world the internet offers, it disintegrates the arguments from ordinary individuals. Meanwhile the media and political leaders are using the sound bite and the power of a few images to represent an argument to the international community. This is the history of our times, not written by the victor, but a fuzzy picture made up of written text in blogs, websites, texts, and emails, digital sounds from web streams and moving images in youtube parodies. It’s hard to tell what will happen next but everyone is telling his or her side of the story.
