Cover not available
Article published In:
Dialogic Matters: Interrelating Dialogue, the Material, and Social Change
Edited by Theresa Castor
[Language and Dialogue 11:1] 2021
► pp. 35–58

Perpetuating ableist constructions of the “real world” through complaints about new communication technologies

| Colorado State University , USA
| Loughborough University , UK

Complaints about the use of new communication technologies are frequent in public discourse and work within a broader assemblage of discourses that promote selective ideologies. What is it that people are doing when they produce these complaints, and how might acts of complaining promote equity in our daily lives? We analyse complaints taken from 16 hours of video recorded dialogues and argue that the complaint discourse about the relationship of new communication technologies to people’s expected embodied functioning and idealized social participation reconstitutes and perpetuates broader ableist discourses about preferred engagement in the “real world.” By identifying intertextuality between two different topical discourses, we expand understanding about the reification of cross-cutting ableist discourses and promote more inclusive language use.

Keywords: ableism, disability, discourse, complaints, new communication technologies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
  • 3.Complaint themes: Function, participation, and the real world
  • 4.Idealized bodies, stigmatized real worlds
    • 4.1Wired-in worlds
    • 4.2Deaf and hearing worlds
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 22 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00083.par
References
Abbass, Eslamirasekh, Jafari Seresht Davood, and Mehregan Masoumeh
2012 “How Do You React to the Breakdown after It Happens? Do You Complain about It? A Contrastive Study on the Complaint Behavior in American English and Persian.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 471: 34–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Antaki, Charles, Rebecca J. Crompton, Chris Walton, and W. M. L. Finlay
2016 “How Adults with a Profound Intellectual Disability Engage Others in Interaction.” Sociology of Health & Illness 39 (4): 581–598. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baynton, Douglas C.
1997 “Bringing Disability to the Centre: Disability as an Indispensable Category of Historical Analysis.” Disability Studies Quarterly 11: n.p. [URL]
Campbell, Fiona A. Kumari
2008 “Exploring Internalized Ableism Using Critical Race Theory.” Disability & Society 23 (2): 151. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 “Inciting Legal Fictions: Disability’s Date with Ontology and the Ableist Body of the Law.” Griffith Law Review 101: 42–62.Google Scholar
Carbaugh, Donal
2007 “Cultural Discourse Analysis: Communication Practices and Intercultural Encounters.” Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 361: 167–182. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cattell, Maria G.
1999 “Elders’ Complaints: Discourses on Old Age and Social Change in Rural Kenya and Urban Philadelphia.” In Language and Communication in Old Age: Multidisciplinary Perspectives by Heidi Ehernberger Hamilton, 295–374. NY: Garland Publishing, Inc.Google Scholar
CDC
n.d.). [URL]. Accessed 25, October 2017.
Cherney, James L.
2011 “The Rhetoric of Ableism.” Disability Studies Quarterly 31 (3). [URL]. Accessed May 7, 2020. DOI logo
Cladis, Andrea E.
2018 “A Shifting Paradigm: An Evaluation of the Pervasive Effects of Digital Technologies on Language Expression, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Political Discourse, and Interactive Processes of Human Communications.” E-Learning and Digital Media 17(5): 341–364. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Leor
2015 “World Attending in Interaction: Multitasking, Spatializing, Narrativizing with Mobile Devices and Tinder.” Discourse, Context, and Media 91: 46–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Connor, Stuart
2010 Promoting ‘Employ ability’: The Changing Subject of Welfare Reform in the UK.” Critical Discourse Studies 7 (1): 41–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dolmage, Jay T.
2017 Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Drew, Paul
1998 “Complaints about Transgressions and Misconduct.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 311: 295–325. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, Susan, and Tanya Romaniuk
2014 “Discourse Analysis.” In Research Methods in Linguistics, eds. Robert J. Podesva and Devyani Sharma, 460–493. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellcessor, Elizabeth
2017 “Cyborg Hoaxes: Disability, Deception, and Critical Studies of Digital Media.” New Media & Society 19 (11): 1761–1777. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erevelles, Nirmala
2011 Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
1989 Language and Power. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman, Ruth Wodak, and Teun A. Van Dijk
1996 ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ in Discourse as Social Interaction, 258–284.Google Scholar
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland
1997 Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Gee, James Paul
2011 An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, 3rd edition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Goggin, Gerard and Christopher Newell
2003 Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Goodley, Dan
2013 “Dis/entangling Critical Disability Studies.” Disability & Society 28(5): 631–644. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grue, Jan
2015 Disability and Discourse Analysis. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited.Google Scholar
2011 “Discourse Analysis and Disability: Some Topics and Issues.” Discourse & Society 22(5): 532–546. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jacknick, Christine M. and Sharon Avni
2017 “Shalom, Bitches: Epistemic Stance and Identity Work in an Anonymous Online Forum.” Discourse, Context & Media 151: 54–64. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jingree, Treena and W. M. L. Finlay
2013 “Expressions of Dissatisfaction and Complaint by People with Learning Disabilities: A Discourse Analytic Study.” British Journal of Social Psychology 52(2): 255–272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara
2002 Discourse Analysis. Great Britain: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Ladd, Paddy
2003 Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon, UK: Cromwell Press, Ltd. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lane, Harlan, Robert Hoffmeister, and Benjamin J. Bahan
1996 A Journey into the Deaf-World. San Diego, CA: Dawn Sign Press.Google Scholar
Mauldin, Laura
2014 “Precarious Plasticity: Neuropolitics, Cochlear Implants, and the Redefinition of Deafness.” Science, Technology & Human Values 39 (1), 130–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 “Parents of Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants: A Study of Technology and Community.” Sociology of Health & Illness 34 (4), 529–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meân, Lindsey J.
2012 “Discourses, Discursive Processes, Intertextuality, and Identities. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 7(2): 145–152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mondada, Lorenza
2014 “Bodies in Action: Multimodal Analysis of Walking and Talking.” Language and Dialogue 4 (3): 357–403. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nixon, Jennifer
2010 “The Politics of Need Interpretation: Discourse and the Needs of Disabled Survivors of Abuse.” Critical Discourse Studies 7 (3): 165–176. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olshtain, Elite and Liora Weinbach
1987 “Complaints: A Study of Speech Act Behavior among Native and Non-native Speakers of Hebrew.” In The Pragmatic Perspective, eds. by Jef Verschueren and Marcella Bertucelli-Papi, 195–208. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Padden, Carol A.
2011 “Sign Language Geography” in Deaf Around the World: The Impact of Language, by Gaurav Mathur and Donna Jo Napoli. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Potter, Jonathan
2003 “Discourse Analysis and Discursive Psychology.” In Qualitative Research in Psychology: Expanding Perspectives in Methodology and Design, eds. by P. M. Camic, J. E. Rhodes, and L. Yardley, 73–94.Google Scholar
Pyysiäinen, Jarkko
2010 “Co-constructing a Virtuous Ingroup Attitude? Evaluation of New Business Activities in a Group Interview of Farmers.” Text & Talk 30 (6): 701–721. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Robles, Jessica S. and Elizabeth S. Parks
2019 “Complaints about Technology as a Resource for Identity-Work.” Language in Society 48 (2): 209–231. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Robles, Jessica S., Stephen DiDomenico, and Joshua Raclaw
2018 “Doing Being an Ordinary Communication Technology and Social Media User.” Language & Communication 601: 150–167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sealey, Alison
2012 “ ‘I Just Couldn’t Do It’: Representations of Constraint in an Oral History Corpus.” Critical Discourse Studies 9 (3): 195–210. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sillars, Malcolm O. and Bruce E. Gronbeck
2000 Communication Criticism: Rhetoric, Social Codes, Cultural Studies. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press Inc.Google Scholar
Sindoni, Maria Grazia
2014 “Through the Looking Glass: A Social Semiotic and Linguistic Perspective on the Study of Video Chats.” Text & Talk 34 (3): 325–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinkeviciute, Valeria
2017 “Variability in Group Identity Construction: A Case Study of the Australian and British Big Brother Houses.” Discourse, Context & Media 201: 70–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Strauss, Claudia
2004 Cultural Standing in Expression of Opinion. Language in Society 33 (2): 161–194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tileagă, Cristian
2005 “Accounting for Extreme Prejudice and Legitimating Blame in Talk about the Romanies.” Discourse & Society 16 (5): 603–624. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thurlow, Crispin and Katherine Bell
2009 “Against Technologization: Young People’s New Media Discourse as Creative Cultural Practice.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14 (4): 1038–1049. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thurlow, Crispin
2006 “From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in Print Media.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 111: 667–701. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tran, Giao Quynh
2002 Pragmatic and Discourse Markedness Hypothesis. Paper presented at Proceedings of the 2002 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. Retrieved March 27, 2017 from [URL]
Velasco, Daniel García
2013 Raising in Functional Discourse Grammar. In Casebook in Functional Discourse Grammar, ed. by J. Lahclan Mackenzie and Hella Olbertz, 249–276. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
West, Isaac
2010 “PISSAR’s Critically Queer and Disabled Politics.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2): 156–175. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth and Michael Meyer
2012 “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 1–33. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.Google Scholar
Zubillaga Del Río, Ainara Carmen Alba Pastor
2013 “Disability in the perception of technology use among university students.” Comunicar 20 (40): 165–172. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Castor, Theresa R.
2021. Dialogic matters. Language and Dialogue 11:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.