Blogs, Vlogs, & Tech Shaping a Culture

My background is in the Deaf community and using American Sign Language. When I was younger, Deaf people congregated at weekly Deaf Club meetings to socialize and experience a sense of community. At these events, people would play Dingo (deaf bingo) and watching a captioned movie was a treat. The Deaf Club was the hub of the Deaf community. In those days few people even had a TDD for using the telephone and there were no relay services or means for Deaf people to use the telephone.

Since then...WOW!...things have changed! Most shows are on TV are closed captioned and DVDs are subtitled (though the special features aren't), relay services are abundant including videophone relay, and cellphones and especially the Sidekick and Blackberry make communication easy and instant. These leaps in technology have meant the demise of the Deaf club and a Deaf Diaspora as people are no longer dependent on their immediate community for support. And just like in English, technology has led to the development of new signs/words in the ASL lexicon.

Ok, background info aside, a new development that I'm interested in is the evolution of the BLOG to the VLOG, or video blog. The Deaf community is rapidly picking up on them and using them to share their views and ideas just like bloggers do. I've been looking at VLOGs by Deaf people to teach other Deaf people how to do it as an interesting instructional design example. English is not native and difficult for a large majority of the Deaf community so being able to VLOG in ASL allows them to be more expressive than if they had to negotiate written English. Just a couple of weeks ago there was actually a symposium in California about Deaf blogs and vlogs.

I wanted to share a video for you and had picked an example of a deaf person explaining how to create a vlog, but I couldn't find one that was captioned so I chose one of the commentaries/reactions about the symposium itself. Like most things in the Deaf community, things tend render themselves into political issues on different sides of a linguistic fence.