Re-Imagining Accessibility & Disability in the Public Sphere
McLuhan Remix: Prologue 1/3 from the Kurtweibers channel.
McLuhan Remix: The Medium is the Mix 2/3 from the Kurtweibers channel.
McLuhan Remix: Epilogue 3/3 from the Kurtweibers channel.
See Jamie O’Neil’s The Medium Is the Mix website and his discussion of fair use and YouTube takedowns.
I missed Jamie’s MiT6 talk, Mashing-Up as Video Essay Writing: A Distinct Form [...]
I had the pleasure of sharing an MiT6 session on Intellectual Property last Sunday with Keidra Chaney and Raizel Liebler, who presented a talk on The Intellectual Property of User-Generated Content. They publish a great blog called The Learned Fangirl, which has many affinities for Fair Use Lab.
See, for example, “#Amazonfail, the Google Books [...]
If you’re coming to the Media in Transition 6 conference at M.I.T., please come to my session on Intellectual Property. It’s scheduled for Sunday, April 26, 2009, 10:45-12:15 p.m. The room is TBA. Here’s the presentation lineup:
Intellectual Property
Keidra Chaney, Raizel Liebler, The Intellectual Property of User-Generated Content
Artur Matuck, Ewriting Prospective: Rescripting Authors’ [...]
While reading W. Terrence Gordon’s biography of Marshall McLuhan, I came across a McLuhan pronouncement so absurd that I need to figure out how to fit it into my MiT6 presentation:
In North America … TV has not been the friend of literacy except to encourage depth involvement in language as a complex structure. In other [...]
My proposal for MiT6. True to form, I met the deadline at the last minute:
A blind reader who constructs an accessible text of Harold Innis’ “The Bias of Communication” will find in it some powerful ideas that suggest why such an accessible text is possible, if not inevitable. Innis’ essay is not available now in [...]
![Shepard Fairey’s “Barack Obama/Hope” image went viral during the 2008 election. Then controversy about the image’s source transformed it into the poster child for fair use in the public debate over copyright and free culture. Now FULAB takes “Hope” as its icon [Image source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/shepard_fairey_hope_2008.jpg "shepard_fairey_hope_2008")
Re-imagining accessibility through the transformations of culture -- particularly the transformative promise of accessible technology for people with disabilities -- is the work of the Fair Use Lab. What does Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster have to do with accessibility? Read more: Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in New York, the social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it. Paul Strand probably didn’t give her much credit for making culture, either. Read more: Curiosity & The Blind Photographer [MiT5 2007] See more on blind photographers.![Promotional artwork for "The Grey Album" by Justin Hampton. This was not used for the actual cover, but appeared on the Danger Mouse website in 2004. [Source: Wikipedia]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/danger_mouse_grey_album_cover_200.jpg "danger_mouse_grey_album_cover_200")
Will DJ Danger Mouse become the Che Guevara of digital sampling? Consider the case for fair use made by The Grey Album.![President George H.W. Bush signs into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990 as Justin Dart looks on. [Source: ucp.org]](http://fairuselab.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ada_signing_072690_ucp_2.jpg "ada_signing_072690_ucp_2")
On its 20th anniversary, pundits will debate what the Americans with Disabilities Act has accomplished. I still believe what I said in a TV interview after the ADA signing ceremony in 1990. “The ADA will not end disability discrimination overnight. But in a nation governed by the rule of law, getting it in writing is the place to start.” So what is the ADA's legacy? A Generation of Problem-Solvers.
I am a parent, homeowner, knowledge worker, and person with disabilities. Oppression is not my true word, but praxis is. In Paulo Freire’s transformative work, I find an affirmation deeper than ideology or political activism -- an affirmation of the dynamic role of disability in culture. I believe the daily praxis of making adaptations and negotiating accommodations represents a significant form of cultural production. Read Disability As Praxis.
a blind flaneur