The social interactions are highly visible in this system. It renders different interactions visible that are not always as visible in the ways we interact with the World Wide Web. That's why I talk about a human infrastructure, because it is very dependent on these social flows. In a way, it does provide a very collective ans social interaction with the content, and at least in my experience, it was a lot more social for me than when I open my computer and get online to search for content.

Anthropologist Michaelanne Dye explores El Paquete Semanal - Cuba's informal, offline digital content compilation and distribution network, and explains how the interactions between downloaders, vendors and customers reveal a human component to the flow of information usually obscured by the online experience outside the country.

Michaelanne is co-author of the paper El Paquete Semanal: The Week's Internet in Havana, presented at the 2018 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.