Always harder to measure a fadeout....
Interesting observation from Sailer. As other Identity Subcultures get stronger, the Deaf culture seems to have faded out.

I noticed the growth of deaf culture in the '80s because I was working around speech and acoustics. After I started working from home in 2004, I lost contact with those movements and hadn't really thought about them. Still, the culture is notable by its absence in recent years.

Atypically, Sailer gets the history wrong.

It’s useful to think about why there is deaf culture but not blind culture. Wikipedia’s article on the former is vastly longer than its short squib on the latter, which sums up, “…blind people integrate with the broader community and culture, and often do not identify blindness as a defining part of their culture.”

That’s because language can be essential to identity. Just as nationalism in Europe was an offshoot of the consolidation of local spoken dialects into a standardized national written language (such as the French government’s imposition of the Parisian dialect on its sprawling domain), deaf culture exists due to the consolidation of sign languages.

Language is fundamental to communication, of course, and perhaps even to thought. So life tended to be extremely difficult for those born deaf, especially if they didn’t work out an idiosyncratic sign language with their families.

Before computers, deaf people had a much wider range of occupations than blind people. Industrial work and farm work need good eyes, but don't need ears. Noisy industrial environments are actually EASIER for deaf people than hearing people.

Deaf folks were common in printing. When I worked at Cromwells, we contracted our linotype work to Gene Laird, a deaf guy who ran his own linotype shop in a storefront. His wife handled the telephone and talked with visitors. Gene ran the machine and drove around to distribute the finished forms to Cromwells and Vaters and Daugherty. No problem after you got used to talking by writing.

Automation and offshoring were thus especially hard on deaf workers. Computers made life easier for blind people, but actually got in the way of AMERICAN deaf people because AMERICAN deaf people are not good at writing and reading English. This is NOT true in other countries. You can see the difference easily when looking at deaf Youtubers. Most Americans type incoherent descriptions and titles. Others, including Brits, write correctly.

This is not a problem with ears, it's a direct result of the deaf subculture eliminating real English from their schools. And this is a standard procedure. "Human rights" crusaders ALWAYS damage their "protected" groups. The "protected" groups must lose their native skills and niches so they need the "protection" of the NGOs and government.

Labels: skill-estate, Sorosia

  ¶ 2:14 PM