According to US Census Bureau of 2000, there is 49.7 million people are disabled. The disability includes vision or hearing impairment, problems of basic physical movements, and cognitive problems, and so on. The disabilities restrict the individuals from performing daily function, getting work, and participating in the political and social life. Those restrictions create inequality between normal people and disabled people. The new media and access try to eliminate those restrictions, and the barrier between normal and disabled people. I will focus on disability of physical movements. There are different types of physical movement disability. They generally include muscular dystrophies, brain and spinal injuries, cerebral palsy, arms and legs injuries. I will provide examples to show how the new media and access help physical movement disabled people. Such as blogs give opportunities to share information and communicate with friends or other people in the community without going outside. E-Card is an electronic greeting card. We can send them over the internet without going out to mail a real card. To the receivers, the e-card also show s message, and it is much faster to get it. The social network sites include Myspace, Facebook, and so on. Those sites also allow the conversation between family, friends, and colleagues online. E-mail, Googledocs, and Texting allow people to send documents over the internet without physically bring the document to the receiver. Video sharing sites, such as youtube allow people to view video online without going out to buy them. People can engage political activities in political website, and discuss about the issue via the website. People can work at home with access to the company by computer. Those are the few simple examples which are the positive side of the new Medias. They help the physical disabled people perform things easily with computer at home without moving around. The negative side of the new media may be eliminating face to face meeting between friends, and people in the community. People get physically movement disability will do less and less movement when they spend major of time on the internet. Those are the general examples which are not based on research. I will explain the positive side and negative side with specific examples with scholar resource in my project.
I didn't realize that new media could help diable person until i read your blog. They might be considered to be a group whom would be easily neglected. You bring a good point that disable could share their information and communicaite with others through social network.
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