ABSTRACT
Information and Communication Technology (ICT), such as Twitter, has become
a viable means of communication between businesses and clients who often
use cell phones to send (“tweet”) messages. As an ICT, Twitter has been defined
as “a microblogging service less than three years old, commands more than
41 million users as of July 2009 and is growing fast. Twitter users tweet about
any topic within the 140-character limit and follow others to receive their tweets”
(Kwak, Lee, Park, & Moon, 2009). A microblog accessible through cell phones,
Twitter has benefited corporations and individuals in the development of
public identities, sharing daily experiences, and commentary (Java, Song,
Finin, & Tseng, 2009). With regard to education, Twitter has already been
shown to provide a productive space for self-reflection on identity through
participation in community discussion for teacher education (N. Wright,
2010). As a Latin@ educator in Arizona, I am interested in the ways ICT
can benefit the written language of Latin@ students by reinforcing support
networks and facilitating the performance of ethnic identity.2 Currently, there
is a paradigm shift occurring as businesses attempt to “woo” Latin@s because
they have been identified as the fastest growing market in the United States
(Chung, 2011). Still, despite the fact that some American-owned factories
are located in Latin American countries like Mexico, these transnational
American companies oftentimes continue to reward those who “Americanize”
and marginalize those performing characteristics of an ethnic experience
(M. Wright, 2006). The privileging of a voice without linguistic variance indic-
ative of a racially marked ethnicity undermines both the potential to connect
to the growing Latin@ market and the potential to better prepare the growing
Latin@ student population to construct a knowledge in technical communi-
cation. For Latin@ students in the United States, the ICT of Twitter could
facilitate communicating in a supportive network and authoring a public
identity, which have been shown to contribute to academic achievement
(Urrieta, 2009). Given the accessibility of Twitter through cell phones and
the Pew research data showing that 35% of Latin@ youth accesses the
Internet using cell phones, as opposed to 21% of White youth (Lenhart &
Pew Research, 2010), ICT practices that inform information literacy (IL)
remain unexplored for this underrepresented student population. James M.
Dubinsky (2004) provides a useful definition of technical writing that illum-
inates how Twitter, as an ICT experience-sharing microblog, can play a role
in technical communication; Dubinsky describes good technical writing
as “a persuasive version of experience” (p. 21). Following Dubinsky’s con-
ceptualization of technical writing as a mode of rhetorical experience, the use
of Twitter by Latin@ students provides a space to reflect on experience while
simultaneously demonstrating how linguistic diversity in technical communi-
cation increases the clarity of messages; by code-switching (alternating between
English and Spanish), Latin@ students perform an ethnically marked linguistic
variance that challenges the instrumental model of technical communication
and reflects the experience of a racialized audience that has been traditionally
marginalized.
