Reflecting on Technology and Disability...

My brother lost roughly 90% of his hearing when he was one year old, and ever since then has used a hearing aid in the one ear that still has any hearing at all. (I almost said "needed a hearing aid," but I don't think he'd agree with that statement.) As his older sister (by about six years), I, of course, felt it was my duty to not cut him any slack whatsoever because of his hearing loss--especially since he learned fairly early on that he could pretend not to hear things that he didn't want to hear and not get called on it by our parents. Still, it hurt me to see him so concerned with how he was "marked" by the large, clunky hearing aid he had to wear in elementary school in order to hear his teachers and classmates. The aid had a large, supposedly-flesh-toned hard plastic case that fit behind the ear and that was connected to a similarly-unrealistically-colored earpiece by a thin plastic tube. It was not attractive. It was not subtle. It was, in fact, both incredibly obvious and the only visual marker of his disability. The unfairness of that has always struck me--that the only thing that marked Allen as being different from his peers was the one thing that could mitigate that difference.

As the technology and my parents' health insurance coverage improved, Allen got access to smaller and--more importantly--better hearing aids: first, he upgraded to a model similar to but slightly smaller than his first, then to one without the bulky behind-the-ear case, and through a series of sleeker and smaller earpiece-only models until he reached the one he uses now, an inside-the-ear model so small that you can't even see it if you're standing right next to him. It was not long after Allen began using this newest hearing aid--a few years ago--that he became interested in learning sign language. It never struck me how unusual that was until doing the readings this week--at the moment when Allen could, if he wanted to, choose not to mark himself as having a disability, choose to remove himself entirely from any public acknowledgment of his disability, he chose instead to strengthen his ties to the deaf community. (I don't mean to imply that Allen has ever shown any signs of being ashamed of his deafness, apart from brief bouts of normal teenage "why am I different?" angst; had he chosen to pretend that he wasn't deaf, I and everyone else who knows him would have been very surprised.) Not only did he (and does he) continue to study sign language, but he joined deaf student organizations, attends deaf student social and academic functions all over Ohio--in effect, he became, for the first time that I am aware of, an actively-participating member of the deaf community.

I'm not entirely sure why the readings this week brought all of this to mind, but I think it has something to do with how we construct ourselves and each other through the technologies that we choose--or have--to use, or even those we avoid using. When Allen's hearing aid was visible to others, it was a public marker of a part of his identity that was (I see now) very important to him. When that technological marker was taken away, it left a hole in that identity that needed to be filled somehow.