Restricted access: media, disability, and the politics of participation

In the era of convergence, in the so-called participatory culture we are all living in, it is assumed that we all have equal access to the world collective knowledge and, as a result, our core social skills are based on the capacity to participate in social networks. However, digital media take for granted able-bodied users forgetting people with a variety of disabilities, who are restricted to its general access and use. Participatory culture cannot be truly egalitarian if it excludes certain people and privileges others; what is more, by doing so it simply reproduces and affirms the existing power structures and the dominant ideologies. This is one of the main arguments of Elizabeth Ellcessor’s Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation. The author presents a number of compelling examples of how difficult Internet access is:

[…] in the absence of captions, d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are limited in their ability to find and view audio-visual content. And in the absence of audio description, in which video images are described aurally, blind and visually impaired users are prevented from accessing the content of audio-visual material. (3)

Hence, with each example described, she asserts that one might say that technology not only fails to ‘fix’ disability but in fact creates it, as these technological barriers function to exclude certain bodies from full participation (3). Such a statement reinforces the idea that the public sphere only fosters engaged, active citizens, leading to creating and reproducing oppressed classes such as people with disabilities.

Throughout the book, Ellcessor invites us to reflect upon digital media contexts from the standpoint of disability and to reconsider the concept of accessibility through a multidisciplinary lens, engaging and linking both critical disability studies and media contemporary cultural studies to see how these fields might inform one another from a theoretical and methodological view. Her approach is based on her findings while undertaking participant observation in different blogs and web pages, in which she prioritised the marginalised voices who are ‘the experts on their own lives’; in fact, this ethnographic methodology helped her to see the actual omissions and exclusions in these often celebrated participatory spaces. Therefore, for the author, it is important to understand the concept of accessibility as the ability of a person with one or more disabilities to make meaningful use of media technology, whether through assistive technologies or through modification of mainstream ones (11). Access can, thus, serve as a means to discuss and promote democratic civic engagement and cultural inclusion.

In order to solve and define all her inquiries, Ellcessor presents an ‘access kit’, a five-category module: regulation, use, form, content, and experience. This module works as a framework to understand the case of digital media access for people with disabilities from new questions and perspectives. Additionally, the kit structures each chapter of the book.

Chapter I questions and explores the concept of regulation; that is to say, how media is regulated in terms of legal structures, international agreements and other forms of policy developments apart from social practices and community norms. Although access to media is regulated by a wide variety of cultural and political institutions, the author states that most regulations are in fact carried out through informal mechanisms and discourses of individuals or the community itself.

Chapter II refers to the use of digital media and its users. Notably, technological systems are set up for particular audiences and tasks, often in such a way as to privilege normative articulations of bodies and culture. Nonetheless, it is well known that people with disabilities use many of the same Web 2.0 tools that are popular among able-bodied people by adapting their devices, by finding other approaches or even by the help of assistive technologies. With this in mind, Ellcessor questions who the actual users are by exposing the existence of alternative positions. The author explains there is a preferred user position that reflects idealised access conditions; her concept is similar to Stuart Hall’s category of the dominant hegemonic position of a television viewer.¹ Indeed, all through the chapter she traces several examples of the cultural construction of intended users and of the hegemonic arrangement of uses in which she concludes that the dominant discourse leaves behind disability (reinforcing barriers and constructing marginalised audiences) because it destabilises the preferred position of the medium.

Chapter III is titled ‘Transformers’, and here the author problematises the forms of media technology and devices; that is to say, the material dimensions, the code structures and the presentation of the interface. Besides, she wonders whether technology should be constructed differently in order to guarantee equal access. Ellcessor separates form from use and content: firstly, because form emphasises the technical elements; and secondly, because content is related to communication and meaning. The author thinks this chapter needs to focus mainly on assistive technologies, such as screen readers, alternative input devices or any other specialised display. In effect, the author shows how mobile phones and tablets are examples of good practices, enabling greater social inclusion. She asserts that, at the level of forms, iPads allow people with communicative impairments to minimise their visible differences from other users in the use of mainstream technologies and cultural relevancies (109).

Contrary to the previous chapter, Chapter IV focuses on content; in other words, it takes into account the cultural meaning conveyed through the systems of communication in the digital media. Content is the meaningful component, designed, written or developed for the purpose of transmitting a message. It comprises values, information, narratives, genres and behaviours (126). In addition, content is the prime location of battles regarding ideologies and representations in media, reinforcing types of audiences, identities and citizens. Ellcessor analyses the types of content that circulate in digital media and realises that – among disadvantaged audiences – information is prioritised over entertainment. According to her, the imaginary of these audiences is that they are passive recipients of charity and content, so the information they need (‘value content’) is that which provides resources to make their lives better. In other words, such statements assume that people with disabilities or other oppressed classes have lives that are in some way deficient, undesirable and in need of improvement.

Chapter V is devoted to conceptualise the term experience as a category through which media access should be analysed. For that reason, the author incorporates different theories and perspectives to describe identity elements of people relations with media. For her, experience includes all of the variable conditions of any media encounter, ranging from material artefacts and physical positions to the goals, motivations and interest of the individuals (162).

Ellcessor tries to define experience from the view of Cultural Studies, as she cites Raymond Williams. Also, she mentions other important authors such as Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. The author affirms that the Phenomenology perspective and its idea of sensory perception of knowledge help her to study of disability. Moreover, Ellcessor integrates feminist theories regarding social constructionism and the non-normative embodiment. This combination of theories is crucial to understanding access through a lens of experience as body, material technology and cultural ideology in a particular situated context.

Additionally, Ellcessor claims that defining experience binds all pieces of her ‘access kit’ together, because it is through lived experiences that concepts of regulation, use, form and content are articulated to one another.

To summarise, throughout Restricted Access, the author argues that access is not a simple phenomenon but a conjoining of elements that produces varied relationships to media, to other people and to society at large. Furthermore, by the end of the book, Ellcessor exposes the importance of the participatory culture concept as it offers an attractive vision of a digitally enabled culture, in which increased access to media production, political participation and social collaboration produces fairer and more egalitarian forms of culture (197). However, participation is not automatically accessible simply because it is available; developing collaborative means of cultural and political interaction requires creating forms of cultural accessibility that value differences in experience and standpoints and not only tolerate but welcome difference.

Analia Hoban
Social Ciences Faculty, Media and Communication Department, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
[email protected]
© 2018 Analia Hoban
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2018.1443587

Notes

1. The dominant hegemonic position occurs when a viewer decodes a message in the same dominant terms in which it was constructed (76). To expand this concept, check Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding’ (2001).