You Already Know How to Use It: Technology, Disability, and Participation
Analysis of popular media and academic literatures related to digital media and participation are central to this chapter. It is particularly instructive to consider two advertisements, from nearly 20 years apart, for the ways in which they hail an able-bodied user.
Finally, this chapter considers the ways in which people with disabilities may create and inhabit alternative user positions, in which bodies, technologies, and cultures are articulated differently. A user-generated video created during the 2008 Presidential election demonstrates how such alternatives may demonstrate and invite users into such alternative positions.
The first is one of several advertisements produced by AT&T as part of a series entitled "You Will" in 1993.
This advertisement is notable for the ways in which it promises a future in which technology enables greater achievements, convenience, and happiness. However, these rewards may be distributed unequally; the woman of color featured in the hospital scene is seen in a wheelchair (and appears to be going into labor in a maternity ward). She does not have her medical history in her pocket - rather, her male partner is seen handing it to a male doctor. Signifiers of race, gender, and ability in this ad suggest that there are some white, male, and able-bodied arrangements that will be more empowered by these technologies than will others.
The second advertisement, "It's You," was released by Yahoo! in 2009.
Here, any representation of technology itself is absent; instead, there is a montage of people and activities. While there are numerous signs of racial, geographical, age, and gender diversity, there is no sign of disability in this advertisement. This is different from ads in earlier eras, such as "You Will" and the well-known MCI "Anthem" advertisement.
"Anthem" incorporated disability as one of many forms of embodied difference that would be made irrelevant by technology. Feminist disability scholar Alison Kafer suggests that it is common to imagine utopian futures as devoid of disability, but that such imaginings reinforce ableist ideas about disability as deficiency and foster eliminationist rhetoric. Furthermore, though "Anthem" promises "no infirmities," accompanied by the image of a young person using sign language, it does nothing to suggest how technologies will be made accessible to - usable by - people who do not fit the empowered white, male, Western, able-bodied user hailed by this advertisement and by mainstream technologies themselves.
To return to "It's You," it should be noted that it is very much part of the larger discourse of "you" that permeated the Web 2.0 era, from roughly 2004 onward, as in this famous 2006 TIME magazine cover that declared "You" the Person of the Year. The use of "you" supports empowering ideas about increased participation and opportunities fostered by user-generated-content and social media. However, this chapter argues that people with disabilities are rarely included as part of the "you" - in fact, much media coverage seems to explicitly treat people with disabilities as different from mainstream users, more serious, less creative, and less able to access the benefits of a participatory culture.