Performance and Digital Communication
There is a performative nature to Internet writing.
Blogging, even the "expert blogs" of pundits, seems to be addressed to live audiences. Interactivity is presumed. Celebrity is implied. Sound, graphics, and search-engine-findable vocabulary may not always sharpen the clarity of a message but they do mark it as distinct from the printed text.
I blog to a narrow channel. That is intentional. In fact, it is strategic and time-limited. Three years into a five-year project my objective is to immersively experiment with Web technologies as a tool to engage consumer, academic, business, and policy constituencies around a single aspect of disability culture — travel. That is the revolve of my daily blog, the Rolling Rains Report.
My contribution to a Disabilities Studies discussion of digital and multi-modal technologies flows from that agenda. My goal locates me closer to the day-to-day than to the theoretical. No longer employed in higher education, I have the leisure to collect, synthesize, and diffuse information that seems relevant. I have the freedom to select modes that promise to be effective. How might this translate to an academic Disabilities Studies environment? I don't know so my answer will include further questions.
One of the questions posed to me was, "What are the responsibilities of educators to use multimodal texts (texts consisting of audio, video, animation, images, and words) in their teaching?"
I think the responsibilities are various but I would break them into two categories.
The first has to do with the integrity of the message. Can the text be communicated faithfully if it is not present in its original mode or modes? Is it distorted by change of mode? For example, I have been following the Wheelchair Dancer blog as she prepared for the world premiere of "Fears of Your Life." It is a production at Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts involving Epiphany Productions, AXIS Dance Company, and Creativity Explored. The work is inspired by a book of the same name written by a developmentally disabled man. The performance involves films, life-sized puppets, cartoon animation, and a dance company of various abilities including a wheelchair user and an amputee. Wheelchair Dancer's posts are an engaging chronicle of one performer. What media re-presentation could effectively capture an actual performance — and the evolution between performances — to make the narrative of this project's cross disability, disabled/nondisabled, and cross-discipline production accessible to a student outside the actual performance?
The second responsibility of an educator has to do with the needs of the learner. If the text is purely audio and the learner is deaf, or purely visual and the learner is blind, what "integrity" is being preserved if it is inaccessible and not transformed into a mode that communicates?
My professional responsibilities as Director of Programs & Services for SeniorNet.org (<SeniorNet.org>) require me to create and evaluate technology education curriculum for seniors. The obvious issues of Section 508 compliance shade into tougher questions addressed through Universal Design for Learning (UDL.) Yet they also often devolve to cultural issues not related to the disabling consequences of aging. These include constraints of imagination enforced by age cohort-specific paradigms with defined attitudes toward technology. Observing this, I would add that the educator must account for issues of digital literacy inhering in group identity when presenting multi-modal text. This literacy is not simply as a function of each individual student's technological adeptness. Posing the question to educators in Disability Studies, "Are there various or conflicting cultures of technology use present within different disability communities?"
My domain at the intersection of travel and disability allows me brief "fronterizo" moments — observations available by crossing through frontiers and between cultures. In preparation for this piece, I structured some passages between linguistic and national cultures as well as outside my primary disability identity as quadriplegic. One bears recounting here.
Orkut is an invitation-only social networked site acquired by Google. Launched in the US, and using English as its "official language," Orkut has historically attracted a large Brazilian membership.
The first necessity was to be invited. That was accomplished through Dr. Regina Cohen a wheelchair-using ("cadeirante" in Portuguese) colleague who is an architect, former political candidate, college professor, and convener of a campus Disability Studies and advocacy group. My initiation was "sink or swim" as she is not a frequent Orkut user. Site navigation and administrator tools are all in English but, whenever possible my participation was in Portuguese. I chose to shape my identity around previous experience with Brazil and Brazilian culture. I joined disability-related sub-communities exclusively.
Several characteristics of the Brazilian communities struck me. First, I easily found a dozen disability-related communities compared to only one in English. Entitled "Disability Rights," I was surprised to discover that members of this English-speaking community were almost entirely from the Indian sub-continent. While Orkut has a Disability Studies Community in Portuguese, and others convened to discuss legal or advocacy issues, there are also communities dedicated to accessible eco-tourism, disabled/non-disabled couples, disability-specific support, pride and physical beauty, and regional gatherings. There seemed to be a willingness to invest and reveal personal identity when using the site's tools - photos, video, private and broadcast text messages, ranking systems and referral. Group membership was fluid — almost conversational. One Brazilian community had created a virtual "coming out" space. The protocol was to post an IM-type self-identification as a cadeirante. Another had a thread for spinal cord injured members to identify the level of their injury.
My overall impression is of a linguistic community ready to use technology in the process of shaping a national exploration of disability identities, social inclusion, and self-expression. The topics of discussion are generally similar to what I read in the English-language blogosphere, but predictably with no discussion of US-centric news, and with more involvement in my specific interest on barrier-free tourism and leisure activities. In fact, a new Brazilian, Argentinean, and Uruguayan collaboration on barrier-free tourism was announced the night this article was completed. There is a simultaneous pull toward greater definition and an impulse to then cross the resulting borders.
Two other questions posed for this forum were, "What kinds of digital communicative practices are being explored and invented by people with differing abilities?" and "In what ways have digital and multimodal technologies enabled new forms of communication among different disabilities studies communities?"
The most dramatic recent example of technology enhancing my access to another community involves the invention of a new combination of digital practices. It evolved as a bit of self-advocacy taking place at YouTube. At YouTube there is a techno-melange by an autistic woman who is engaged in a campaign to assert her intelligence and dignity. She does not speak in her videos so my assumption is that she is unable to. In her productions she incorporates a variety of techniques. She types, records the text as speech output from her PC, close captions that speech along the bottom of the screen, and once turned the camera onto a font-enlarged email she received so that the viewer could read along as she scrolled down through it. As she comments, most people seeing her on the street would not believe that she was capable of such clarity of thought and articulate communication. Indeed, several respondents to her videos express their doubt and scorn abusively. I have posted links to some of her videos and one thoughtful video response by a musician at the Rolling Rains Report (February 19, 2007; <http://www.rollingrains.com/archives/001466.html>)
Signing in as "silentmiaow" or "A[manda] M. Baggs," she captures herself engaging in iterative behavior in the first half of her first video. She then explains its significance as "language" in the second half using the speech synthesized text that she generated from her PC. She argues that just as she had to work at learning to communicate in English others should stretch themselves to recognize her idiosyncratic communication style as valuable and evidence of thought. Her argument is presented in English but much of the rhetorical power of her presentation also resides in the fact that her manipulation of various digital media is thoughtfully structured to redundantly communicate her argument to an audience that uses what she experiences as a non-native thought and communicative system.
Speaking to the experience of physical disability Susan Wendell, author of The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability wrote:
Not only do physically disabled people have experiences which are not available to the able-bodied, they are in a better position to transcend cultural mythologies about the body, because they cannot do things the able-bodied feel they must do in order to be happy, 'normal,' and sane....If disabled people were truly heard, an explosion of knowledge of the human body and psyche would take place. (274)
An author selects content and modes of expression with the characteristics of a readership in mind. Identifying performance as an overlay in the digital communication of people with disabilities may help to isolate and identify the cultural fault lines perceived by the author. Once the barriers to access and manipulation of digital technologies are crossed, allowing authorship by people with disabilities, it may be that innovation in the use of that technology is likely to occur. This innovation around the performance of difference can also then make available an experience that transcends cultural mythologies about what it means to be human.
WORKS CITED
- Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 1994.
