Disability and new media

Disability and New Media is a significant book by Australian authors Ellis and Kent. Published in 2011 and released in paperback in 2013, the ‘New Media’ of the title describes social networks, blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites and virtual worlds. The authors also consider digital devices: ebooks, tablets, mobiles and apps. In this detailed undertaking, Ellis and Kent acknowledge the legacy of Digital Disability (Goggin and Newell 2003), a seminal work applying a ‘disability’ perspective to emergent networked technologies. Since 2003, the digital landscape has changed dramatically. Facebook and Google have faded into the foreground. A critical history of such companies and their role in structuring experiences of disability is long overdue. Disability and New Media delivers this interesting account; it examines technology’s capacity to enable and disable people with impairments, and it critically identifies the key social, economic, legal and technical forces that determine accessibility.

The book has three sections. Part One considers the current status quo. Part Two examines ‘browser wars’ and the outcomes for website accessibility, usability and compliance with web standards, alongside a greater engagement with the social web. Part Three looks to the future.

Ellis and Kent begin by outlining the factors that influence Universal Design and its application. The second chapter turns to the accessibility of Apple products and their development. In Chapter Three the authors hit their stride, offering a precise history of Web developments from the early Internet to the advent of Twitter. Here, Ellis and Kent scrutinise networked publics and claims made for the democratisation of information and voice. They also critique the narratives that dominate popular perceptions of technology and disability.

In Part Two, the authors use Finkelstein (1980) as a springboard into a consideration of the relationship between technology and disability in medical, deficit, social and more post-structural terms. As the authors develop their arguments they break new interdisciplinary ground. There is a delicate balance to be struck when forging new language at this intersection, however. During Chapters Four and Six the authors offer their own theoretical framing of disability and its relation to new media. Here, amongst the technical and theoretical language familiar to Disability Studies and Computer Sciences, the authors present Kent’s (2008) conceptualisation of the interactions between hardware, software, the user’s technical expertise and their socio-cultural context. Kent identifies these aspects as ‘software’, ‘hardware’, ‘wetware’ and ‘cultware’, which converge to ‘determine both if access is possible and the quality of that access’ (66). The authors are right to throw focus onto the socio-cultural spaces that technology inhabits. However, this formulation is problematic. Itemising systems and users in this way is unhelpful. Software and hardware are blurred and the separation between a person’s expertise and their context is contestable; the terms ‘wetware’ and ‘cultware’ also imply a comparison between two very different things: on the one hand, computer ‘wares’; and on the other, human beings, learning and culture. The authors offer these as a useful mode for conceptualising the strata of complex interactions between hardware, software, users and their social milieu, but I deeply disagree with this formulation. Elsewhere, Disability and New Media asserts a social model perspective; yet the ‘wetware’/‘cultware’ model insinuates a machine-eye view of people and culture that is at best dehumanising. People are not nodes with equivalence to machines. Whilst the authors seek to foreground cultural specificity as an integral part of human–computer interaction through ‘cultware’, the use of ‘ware’ unhelpfully alters and re-organises the way we think about culture. Metaphors delivered from technology are frequently offered as neutral, despite being politically loaded. Using machines as the source domain for this labelling prioritises machines over human experience in a way that is antithetical to the critical thinking evident across the rest of the book. Importantly, as ‘wetware’ (given as the user, human expertise) is described in terms of capacity (with a biologically reductive undercurrent) readers will also be concerned that the authors fail to address the complexity of cognitive ability and learning disabilities within this hardware/software/wetware/cultware matrix. As these terms punctuate two chapters, the authors could have more explicitly and critically justified their use.

The book’s final chapters focus on the future, a challenging premise given the quixotic nature of the Web. For example, the authors begin with a scholarly account of disability and the virtual world Second Life, a collaborative and immersive online environment. Second Life has received a lot of press, in large part due to the identity play available to users (‘residents’) who interact through customisable avatars. This study offers a thorough examination of the technology and its development in relation to disability. However, developers Linden Labs made one-third of their workforce redundant in 2010, withdrawing their educational/not-for-profit discount in 2011. In the future, immersive environments may become more globally significant, but this is not guaranteed.

In summary, Disability and New Media presents an essential new history of digital media. Ellis and Kent offer a meticulous account of the structural enaction of disability in the design and delivery of new media. The book focuses mainly on the socio-technical properties of these technologies rather than the person-to-person experiences of prejudice and exclusion that may be perpetuated across a network. However, this account testifies to disabled people’s digital rights, tenacity and the importance of accessible digital media for all. The authors highlight valuable concepts, hidden histories and developments that inform all our lives. As such, this book makes useful reading for computer scientists and disability scholars alike, highlighting the need to develop this field. Disability and New Media does not represent a definitive guide to social media, new technologies and disability. Such an omniscient review is not possible when the very newness of the technologies in question resist definition and when the authors have at one point lost some critical focus. Nonetheless, this book represents a significant inquiry, offering a gateway for scholars and activists investigating the affordances of media that increasingly shape our understanding of our world and ourselves.

Sarah Lewthwaite
King’s College London, UK
[email protected]
© 2014, Sarah Lewthwaite
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2013.864864