Why so much attention? Some portions of the Deaf community have been happy to see that there was interest on the part of a hearing public, seeing an interpreter in a disaster situation for likely the first time, while others have argued that there was an immediate sexualization of Callis, and her emotiveness, which might not have attached to a male interpreter. Broadly, there is discomfort with the idea of an interpreter attaining a kind of celebrity, as they are called upon to act as intermediaries, not as messengers in their own right. Callis herself has rejected her new notoriety, arguing that she was simply doing her job for the audience in the room and on television, as she told reporters that “Hearing people tend to not understand that deaf people need those facial expressions.” Similarly, many interpreters and Deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans have seen this as a case in which ASL and non-hearing culture are being misunderstood or appropriated for humor.

Alongside these explanations and critiques, I want to suggest that all of these reactions are rooted in a media environment and audience experience in which access for people with disabilities, as well as access measures other non-mainstream ethnic or cultural groups, are regularly rendered invisible. Callis shattered that invisibility, her large gestures and expressive face demonstrating that media access could (and ought?) to be seen.

The invisibility of media access surrounds us; closed captions on television are hidden unless turned on, and the coding of a web page for a screenreader waits in the HTML to be activated by users or their assistive technologies. Media experiences, in their default forms, hide the measures needed to render themselves accessible to diverse audiences. Captions that are off, unless turned on, structure the media experience to be tailored to an able audience by default, and require those who need them to take action. Even the laws that govern media access, such as the recent 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, are nearly invisible except to specialists. Their aims are to increase access without dampening innovation – most often, this means that legal structures favor adding access as invisibly as possible. To return to captions, their optional nature and English language reinforce a normative media experience in the United States. Though laws require accessible transmission of emergency messages, it is rare to see this done in ASL, which is visible, non-optional, and not based on English language. It is rare, in short, for mainstream audiences to see access measures at work.

This invisibility of media access in many ways reflects a larger historical exclusion of disability and other forms of bodily variation from public view, public culture, and public politics. Disability and cultural and linguistic variation are not marginal to the American public, but when variations are made invisible to a mainstream audience, default abilities, means of access, and experiences of media are normalized.

Lydia Callis broke through that invisibility. Difference was suddenly made centrally visible, and that, in turn, called into questions the normative media experience. If this is a rare glimpse of what inclusive media looks like, then the lack of inclusion is made suddenly undeniable. By seeing her public appearance as a confrontation of the normative media experience, we can better understand some of the more egregious reactions to Callis as attempted reinforcement of those norms. For instance, the Chelsea Lately sketch featured Chelsea Handler calling the interpreter “over-zealous” and distracting, before a woman came out to “interpret” Handler’s message, in a mock-sign language that involved grabbing her own breasts. What is interesting, however, is not just that Handler attempted a poor parody, but that this sketch deliberately targeted ASL interpreting as too feminine, too flamboyant, too different, and too distracting; it is funny only with the assumption that media access ought to be unseen. For Handler, and many others who responded, Callis was simply too visible. As a visible woman, she was sexualized. As a visible reminder of difference, she was mocked. And, as a visible media performer, she was granted a measure of instant celebrity.

The sketch has already been taken down from YouTube and E! Online, after being criticized by the National Association for the Deaf, among others. It seems to still be available through Xfinity. Notably, in all its online forms, this clip lacked captions, in violation of recent accessibility laws, not that anyone would know that unless they went looking for opt-in access. Once again, it seems that the persistant invisibility of media access allows for it to be forgotten, by audiences and industries alike, except under exceptional circumstances. Callis’ moment of visibility may not be ideal for an interpreter wary of celebrity, but it is an important indication of what is often not seen in the mediated public sphere, and of how people react when confronted with what they usually do not see. As a necessary reminder of media access and audience diversity in a time of trouble, Callis did her job well.

Photo credit: Wrote's Flickr stream

Last week, I joined 250 international scholars in Gothenburg, Sweden for Internet Research 11, the 2010 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. The conference theme – Sustainability, Participation, Action – carried over into the emphasis on producing a greener academic conference, with programs available on USB sticks and an all-organic menu. IR 11 is wildly interdisciplinary, tied together largely by research topic, leading to a number of fascinating connections, disjunctures, and challenges. With up to seven concurrent sessions, however, my experience is obviously only a partial view of the work being done.

On Thursday, I began with a panel on user-generated culture, which included presentations on material fan practices that cross into the online, Chinese fans of US television, YouTube memes, and fan-made film trailers. Limor Shifman drew our attention to the role of the interent not just as paradise for memes, but “paradise for meme researchers,” who can more easily follow the flows of cultural material, and Kathleen Williams expanded on this theme by using spatial frameworks to understand the expansion of fan-made film trailers. Afterwards, the roundtable on “Sustainable Entertainment” offered a range of academic and industrial perspectives on what makes entertainment media sustainable, and how online content and distribution channels may contribute to sustainability. Featuring Jean Burgess, Mia Consalvo, Patrick Wikström, Martin Thörnkvist of music label Songs I Wish I Had Written, Wenche Nag of TelNor, and convened by Nancy Baym, the roundtable addressed the possibilities for the music industry, particularly the possible roles for services such as Spotify, in reframing the possibilities for sustainable entertainment careers, as well as the changing games industry, the challenges of creating the variety and change that sustain systems of culture, and the persistent question of e-waste and the materiality of the digital.

This question of sustainable ICT in terms of devices, hardware, and labor was revisited in Friday’s keynote by Peter Arnfalk of Lund University in Sweden. Arnfalk discussed both the greening of IT (making technology more environmentally friendly) and greening through IT (using technology to reduce the environmental impact of other activities). The audience, via Twitter (hashtag #ir11), appeared struck by the statistics that attempted to concretize the impact of technology – one Google search emits 0.2 grams CO2, and ICTs account for 2% of total CO2 emissions. Arnfalk went on to discuss the European and Swedish experiences with addressing green IT through business and policy channels in the past 15 years.

The final keynote featured Nancy Baym discussing the evolution of media production, distribution, and fandom in light of the internet. Starting from her personal interest in, appropriately, Swedish pop music, she went on to address the “Swedish Model” more broadly, as music labels attempt to work with the decentralization in music, sharing their products freely rather than clinging to old models. This involves looking for new possible revenue streams, including making money from sources other than listeners and fans, and seems to foster the rise of a “middle-class musician,” who can attain mild success in a diverse mediascape. The role of social media was addressed in terms of the relative rewards for fans and audiences, and Baym closed by asking whether this new landscape means academics need to interrogate our notions of “fans,” “audiences,” and “community.”

Facebook was omnipresent – presenters addressed surveillance, identity and personal branding, community, and of course, privacy. Michael Zimmer proposed that the “laws of social networking,” and its business imperatives, lead to a desire to “make privacy hard,” and thus attempting to influence Facebook’s privacy policies may no longer be possible. Instead, he suggested moving forward through channels of government regulation, developing alternate technologies, or encouraging media literacies. Alice Marwick and danah boyd discussed their recent fieldwork with American teenagers, who increasingly treat Facebook as a hyper-public space (“shouting to a crowd”) and turn to hiding their messages from parents while sharing with peers (steganography), or using alternatives such as private Twitter accounts (“talking in a room”).

AoIR also seems to be developing a robust games community, featuring a handful of dedicated sessions and the inclusion of games research in a variety of panels. While MMOs, particularly World of Warcraft, were central to many of the papers presented, scholars also addressed casual online gaming, game cultures that extend beyond the game space, digital distribution of games, gaming in social networking sites, and console games such as Left for Dead. Questions of identity, affect, and power within gaming spaces crossed between panels and conversations.

Finally, Friday’s roundtable on the futures of academic publishing combined exciting possibilities and success stories with warnings about the inherent unsustainability of the current US system of journal and book publishing as it relates to defunding university libraries, tenure and promotion, and the peer review system. Participants included Nicholas Warren Jankowski, Clifford Tatum, Steve Jones, Alex Halavais, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Stu Shulman. Projects such as Media Commons and open peer review were discussed, as were the possibly changing roles of journals and books in an era of self-publishing and alternative forms of scholarly conversation. Panelists advocated writing for more popular audiences – or at least making scholarship accessible outside the academy – as well as the necessity of senior scholars participating in new publishing forms and of all of our active participation in reforming journal hierarchies and the standards by which tenure and promotion are determined.

In an interview with The LA Times, Matlin describes the show as “a deaf/hearing version of “Little People, Big World.” Entertainment Weekly takes up this comparison, and takes the opportunity to knock the “cloying, artificial product-placed problems” of family shows currently airing on TLC (The Little Couple, 19 Kids and Counting, and others as well as Little People, Big World and Jon and Kate Plus 8). But My Deaf Family, as seen in the pilot, could provide a much more informative, nuanced, and emotionally resonant look at the daily life of Americans in extraordinaroy circumstances.

Matlin has long been a spokesperson for the importance of captioning, on behalf of the National Association for the Deaf and other organizations, and My Deaf Family is available with closed captioning, in addition to the subtitles that appear on the screen during signed conversations. This makes airing My Deaf Family on YouTube a welcome complement to Google and YouTube’s efforts to promote automated captioning of videos, which I tried out in its initial stages last fall. Google’s policy blog covered Matlin’s series, and the YouTube blog posted full (captioned) video of her talk at Google headquarters as well as statistics about the show’s success on YouTube, where it has over 87,000 views.

Working with Matlin and My Deaf Family is a potentially powerful collaboration for Google/YouTube as they attempt to make autocaptioning a reality and accessibility a priority. In his history of closed-captioned television, Greg Downey found that captioning became a priority to the US government only once the beneficiaries of captioning were understood to be not only the deaf/hard of hearing audiences, but students and immigrants learning English, part of a long history of mainstream benefits leading to much-delayed improvements for people with disabilities. In the digital realm, though, captions already have mainstream value – textual versions of multimedia content are useful in search engine optimization, in improving search engine algorithms, in translating material, and in providing transcripts of events to be used by bloggers with a quick turnaround time. The advantage of incorporating My Deaf Family is that captioning and accessibility can be tied to entertainment, and gain a cache as not necessarily a technical or niche feature, but as compelling topics in their own right, that could extend the range of entertainment options we have available.

Finally, I would suggest that Matlin could similarly benefit from YouTube. Only the 9-minute pilot has been fully finished, as Matlin still hopes for television distribution and financing, seeing YouTube as a promotional vehicle for her show. Yet, in taking the show to YouTube, Matlin told the Times

“YouTube is akin to having my own network. After a small initial outlay, I am putting the show out there myself for all to see, hoping that the reaction will be great and that sponsors and networks will see that the show can work.”

This is exactly the logic that has allowed a number of web series to take to the internet and create interesting, innovative content that might not find a home on television – The Guild, Odd Jobs, Auto-Tune the News – or that supplement television in interesting ways – Valemont, The Office: Subtle Sexuality, The Secret Life of Scientists. The Streamy awards, “honoring excellence in original web television programming and those who create it,” are now in their second year, and have already recognized several of these series, bringing them additional attention, viewers, and financial opportunities. Whether it’s increased broadband speeds, mobile video technologies, media spreadability, social networking sites, something else or a combination thereof, we’re moving beyond the struggles of Quarterlife, and allowing My Deaf Family to develop online, in adorable 9-minute chunks like this pilot, might ultimately be what allows it to succeed on its own terms, presenting deaf culture to a wide audience.

Now, Google has announced that they may change that policy. It seems that a large-scale attack on their servers – as well as those of other major businesses, reportedly including Adobe – originated in China, and appeared targeted on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. In a concluding paragraph to a blink-and-you-miss-it blog post, Google says:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

.

In the wake of the announcement, questions are being raised about whether the attacks originated inside the Chinese government, about the overall security of Google’s cloud-computing products, and about what this will mean for the over 300 million Internet users in China. Already, Secretary of State Clinton has asked for an explanation from the Chinese government, as “The ability to operate with confidence in cyber space is critical in a modern society and economy,” and Google has announced that Gmail will begin to automatically encrypt data for all users. Zhou Shuguang, a Chinese blogger, tells The Washington Post that “the withdrawal from China will wake up more Chinese and make more people discover that China lacks freedom on the Internet and the government has very strong censorship online. There are no benefits to people at all if Google continues to make concessions with Chinese authorities.” Certainly, Google withdrawal would be hugely unpopular among those who use the search engine.

Competing Chinese search engines, on the other hand, are downplaying Google’s announcement as a business decision made because of Google’s relatively small (20-30%) market share. Baidu, which controls roughly two-thirds of the Chinese search engine market, has already seen its shares rise 16% since the announcement, as it may soon become even more dominant.

There are obvious issues of freedom of speech, human rights, national policy, and industrial factors at play in this scenario, and it looks to be a high-profile developing story. Here, global networks are crashing up against national policies and cultural norms, and it’s unclear what (if any) outcome could satisfy the competing interests at play.

Facebook logo

New Oxford American Dictionary, it’s over. No more status updates, no more shared photos – you’re unfriended.

This week, Oxford University Press announced it’s Word of Year for 2009 – “unfriend.” It’s defined as “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.” Lexographers at OUP were particularly struck by the word’s use – an “unfriend” isn’t an enemy (noun), but what you do to end a friendship on a social networking site (verb). Of course, “friend” is used in the same sense when you add someone to your contacts on a site (no word on whether that will be added to the main entry).

This will be going in to the New Oxford American Dictionary (presumably right between “unfret” and “unfriendly”) soon, preserving forever one of the most awkward of online social interactions. The vagaries of social interactions, relationships, and manners wrapped up in this word are a knotty problem – and regularly addressed by advice columnists, academics, and countless others. Among my acquaintances, the 2008 US election precipitated a wave of unfriending angst – were people’s political beliefs, vociferousness, and/or obtuseness unfriendable offenses, or merely worthy of being put on limited profile?

Fortunately, Facebook and other SNS do not (yet) send people notifications that they have been unfriended, limiting the potential hurt feelings, insulting exchanges, and wounded pride that would result. However, there are third party apps that can tell you when you’ve been unfriended – perfect for the person with a healthy sense of self, or a strong masochistic streak. And, if the unfriended are paying attention, they’ll know what you did – and might try to friend you again.

It seems that the benefits of online social interaction have gone fully mainstream – leading to new and exciting anxieties about how we manage our presentations of self, and our relationships with a variety of people, when they increasingly take place in the same context. Whether it’s your uncle and your roommate arguing on your Facebook Wall, or a date answering texts from work while out to dinner, there aren’t strong codes of conduct to easily apply. A recent episode of This American Life focused on “frenemies,” and one story hinged on a broken friendship that was awkwardly resurrected through Facebook, and ended with an unfriending. The New York Times chronicles the increasing “rudeness” and its accompanying “scolds” who make a hobby out of correcting such behavior. Given the simultaneous fading of strong social norms of etiquette (did you know that your napkin goes on the chair when you get up from the table mid-meal?), the cries for stronger enforcement of politesse seem both hopelessly outdated and charmingly rebellious.

Ultimately, though, I’m just glad that the Word of the Year didn’t go to either “sexting” or “teabagger.”

Artie in his wheelchair

Last night’s episode of Glee, “Wheels,” focused on Artie and put the entire club in wheelchairs for a performance. It also attracted a lot of attention and some controversy. A number of actors with disabilities expressed disappointment that Artie is played by an able-bodied actor, Kevin McHale, rather than by an actor who does use a chair. Darryl “Chill” Miller and Geri Jewell are working actors with disabilities, but they’re some of a very few on television, in film or theater.

I haven’t watched a lot of Glee thus far – it wore a little thin for me after a few episodes, I did find it somewhat stereotypical, and I was desperate to learn about the characters who weren’t part of the two white, heterosexual, maybe-baby love triangles. Tina, particularly, was underdeveloped initially, unless a quiet Asian woman was what they were going for. “Wheels” brought me back out of curiosity, and I’m torn.

Pros:

• Glee is charming, and darkly funny, and I want to like it (no matter how often it disappoints me).
• The episode is rare in its focus on a person with disabilities, and having that out there, and McHale’s enthusiasm for the role, are all good things on some level.
• The messages about physical accessibility were really well-done. Throughout, accessibility for the entire school, rather than just Artie, is emphasized in discussions of ramps, buses, and inclusion in school events and organizations.
• The introduction of Becky, a girl with Down Syndrome, broadens the understanding of what disability is in Glee‘s world – it’s not just wheelchairs.

Cons:

• I am disappointed about the casting, and the lack of actors with disabilities representing themselves on TV. The longer actors with disabilities don’t play these parts, the harder it is for them to get experience and work and get other parts down the road.
• I had some qualms about the dancing, related to the hype that surrounded it and lack of acknowledgment for a history of wheelchair dancing.
• The tired practice of putting able-bodied people into chairs to “understand” a disabled experience rubbed me the wrong way.
• The revelation of cheerleading coach Sue’s sister, though, provided too pat a reason for Becky’s inclusion – and reiterated the humanizing linkage of athletic characters and their siblings with disabilities that seems so prevalent on TV lately.

The roughly equal lists up there suggests that I don’t know whether I liked this episode or not. Have other folks seen it? Did you like it? Are you rooting for Artie/Tina? Am I overlooking an obvious reason to appreciate this episode, or Glee generally?

Here, Wheaton kicks things off, making fun of and celebrating his own geek status. W00tstock also happened to coincide with the geek-gasm of Wheaton’s appearance (as himself) on The Big Bang Theory on CBS.

But one of the most interesting elements of the LA performance was the inclusion and popularity of Felicia Day, who has become an icon of the geek world in the past year or two through gaming-themed web series The Guild. Below, she and her castmates perform an acoustic version of their hit promotional music video “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?”

Day has had a speedy rise to near-fame – from bit roles on television to starring in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, and writing/producing/starring in The Guild, and appearing in the best-received (and never aired) episode of Dollhouse season one. She’s a gamer, she’s part of the Joss-verse, and throughout, she’s used social media to build her star image and interact with fans. Day’s Twitter feed is more popular than Wheaton’s; her Goodreads account makes her reading habits public; she’s run a personal blog for nearly three years; and she’s on Flickr, Facebook, and delicious, to name a few. I’m watching her use of social media and her rising star pretty closely – could she be the first person to turn social media success into a bona fide subcultural stardom? (Tila Tequila is not a star.)