Ouch and Boom!
People with a wide range of disabilities are accessing the kind of online support Robyn Steward talks about. Gideon Goldberg is a web developer at BBC Ouch!, a website from the BBC that ‘reflects the lives and experiences of disabled people’.
“The community elements are a key part of the site,” he says “in terms of allowing our audience to discuss their experiences in a safe environment. They are also a way for our users to share the wealth of knowledge they have about all aspects of disability life.”
Goldberg sees sites like Ouch! as important channels, harnessing the potential of Web 2.0 for creating community. In the US, one of the leading sites of this nature is Disaboom.com, ‘a dynamic, interactive online community for people with disabilities and those whose lives they touch.’ Kim Dority is the Vice President of Content at Disaboom and I asked her how she sees the role of the site in people’s lives.
“People with disabilities are often marginalized by society, and often both emotionally and logistically isolated from human interaction” Dority says. “Disaboom has tried to create pathways that enable people to build bridges across that marginalization and isolation through blogs, chats, forums, surveys and polls, and affinity groups.”
So, sites like Ouch and Disaboom can enable people with disabilities to create communities together. I wondered, however, whether they also had the potential to actually change the marginalization that Dority refers to. In other words, could they also reach out to non-disabled people and educate wider society?
A recent survey on the Ouch! site indicated that about 80% of its visitors are in fact non-disabled. According to Goldberg, “this reflects the broader interest in this subject.” Dority is somewhat less positive, however. “Although we would LOVE to have an impact on the attitudes of ‘mainstream’ society, we simply don’t have the positioning to do that, nor that level of visibility or reach.”
If these dedicated sites don’t have the mainstream reach to play a wider educational role, then what about using other vehicles? Vehicles that certainly do have the reach. Amanda Baggs and Robyn Steward have both used YouTube to good effect in talking about life with autism. Indeed, Robyn says “Web 2.0 can be very educational and can change people’s perceptions.”
Surely, hugely popular social networking platforms like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and others provide a way of creating more of a dialogue between disabled and non-disabled people?
Or do they?
Part 5: Knocking on Facebook's Door