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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
that increases the costs significantly, provides a rather narrow bandwidth and which
is less reliable than the up-to-date technology of submarine fibre optic cables. By 31
December 2007, according to the annual report of the Ministry of Information and
Communication of Cuba (2006), out of a population of 11 236 790 inhabitants, the
country had 1 310 000 Internet users (11.7%), with 321 000 of them enjoying full
Internet access (2.9%). For more than 45 years, however, Cuba has been creating the
educational bases essential for the mass appropriation of the ICTs, with a high
literacy level and an average level of schooling very nearly equivalent to the 11th
grade of Senior High School in the US. Cuba devotes 8.5% of its Gross National
Product (GNP) to education, a fact that places Cuba among the first five countries in
the world (UNDP, 2004) as regards the proportion of the GNP assigned to the
educational sector.
Free access to information is one of the myths of current times. It has been widely
debated that the continuous information and news overload – having a seemingly
objective nature – responds to the interests of the oligopolies and doesn’t have a truly
objective nature. There seems to be a uniform way of thinking or seeing things.
Regarding this, Eduardo Galeano has affirmed: “There is an obligatory uniformity
that is hostile towards the cultural diversity existing in the planet” (1998: 17). This
sums up one of the most complex challenges that the ICTs impose on us at a global
and national level. Knowledge itself is going through a complex process of
commercialization, which opposes UNESCO’s statement that says “…in the
twenty-first century science must become a shared asset benefiting all peoples on a
basis of solidarity…” (UNESCO, 1999). The capacity of the endogenous production
of knowledge, a necessary condition for the information society, clearly seen in the
resources assigned to research studies in universities and specialized centres, has
reached 1.75% in Cuba, in contrast with the 0.6% of the GNP of Latin America and
the Caribbean (UNDP, 2001).
Globalization and particularly the increasingly commercialized and concentrated
mass media have a significant (and not always positive) impact on culture. The
Internet does not escape the trend of commercialization and the network of networks
has a big impact on the planet concerning the creation of values that modify our
behaviours. Still, the development of new technologies is a product of culture, and it
forces us to appreciate it as an instrument, a mediator. As Hervé Fischer points out: “It
may be stated that the cyber-world is also a parallel world, and not only a replacement
mirror-world, because it self-generates previously unknown contents that are part of
it, and are far away from the obligations of a real world” (Fischer, 2004).
The Internet brings many advantages due to its huge communicational potential,
but it is dependent on the quality of information that is available through it. So for a
small country, such as Cuba, it becomes significant how it is represented through it,
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