The Experience of Blogging and Enhancing Social Presence The Case of Disabled Bloggers

The purpose of this study is to study how blogging practices influences positive self- presentation, expands social networks and enhances social participation of disabled people. Furthermore, the paper explores how these uses have credited the social inclusion of bloggers with disability in their everyday life, esp. in their interpersonal relationships. Applying Latour’s 1986 Translation of Innovations approach, an analytic approach to focus further on the users’ interpretation of technologies, we studied the individual experiences of both the disabled and the disability activists to extract the patterns of their blog use in their everyday life. A snowball sampling was used in this study to gather needed information. In-depth interviews were aslo conducted with 15 bloggers. Findings revealed that bloggers found weblog as a tool to connect to the disabled people, from one hand and, to connect to the larger society, i.e. people without disability, or those who have no immediate contact with people with disability from the other hand. Regarding the former use, weblog was mainly considered as a societal medium to provide the disabled society with items such as disability news, medical and health care information, individual experiences on how to manage one’s disability in everyday life, and consultation on different areas. As for the latter use, bloggers first saw weblog as a tool to present a new narrative of bodies with disability, different from the dominant normal vs. Pathologic discourse, to expose the Disability Identity. According to the bloggers under study, people with disability are isolated and marginalized in society as a whole.