Since social networking removes actual face to face interaction, individuals tend to feel more open to sharing personal information and details about their life in the cyber world than in the real world. For people with mental disabilities, especially children, their everyday social interactions are hindered because of their impairments. Essentially, they fear social rejection more so than a mentally and physically able bodied child. With the ability to hide behind a profile picture and not having so witness other reactions to their social network profiles, disabled individuals can utilize social media and networking sites to bridge the gap between themselves and other able bodied individuals. They can experience interactions with their peers that they may have been afraid to experience before. In a way, social networking sites can be considered a form of speech therapy if you will. Rather than sitting in a speech and language lab or lying on a psychologists couch, these disabled children who have access to the digital world and are instructed on how to use it can interact and build relationships as if they were living without any sort of disability.
In my first hyper-essay, I will explore the topic new to me: the digital divide between disabled and enabled as well as inquire about solutions to narrow the gap. In class we talked a lot about the digital divide between privileged and oppressed. This discussion led us to all sorts of oppression and minority groups both ethnically and socially such as Native Americans living on reservations, public school students in poor areas, to any sort of minority group being represented in the media. My goal for this hyper-essay is to delve deer into the lack of accessibility to media, more specifically social media for the disabled. Before we can explore this topic further together we must first identify an important stigma that comes we being disabled or impaired. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, disability is a condition that damages or limits a person's physical or mental abilities. The condition of being unable to do things the so-called normal way. On the other hand, impairment means to damage or make worse in some material respect. Society tends to believe that these to words are interchangeable when in fact they are not. Disability lends to a more negative connotation when used to refer to a social group. Like all negative connotations it empowers dominant groups. In this case it empowers the abled, but more specifically not the abled advocates for the disabled rather the abled who ignore struggles of the disabled. My goal is to bring light to this issue and moreover, empower this disabled as well as their abled-bodied advocates. Empowerment of the disabled and impaired can help integrate them back into society and essentially bridge this gap of digital divide. Since social networking removes actual face to face interaction, individuals tend to feel more open to sharing personal information and details about their life in the cyber world than in the real world. For people with mental disabilities, especially children, their everyday social interactions have been hindered because of their impairments. Essentially, they fear social rejection more so than a mentally and physically able bodied child. With the ability to hide behind a profile picture and not having so witness other reactions to their social network profiles, disabled individuals can utilize social media and networking sites to experience interactions with their peers that they may have been afraid to experience before. It is essential that we as abled-bodied individuals work to bridge this gap so that the disabled and impaired can interact and build relationships as if they were living without any sort of disability. As if they were not just another minority group being oppressed by the media.