Disability Rhetoric

My work here is mostly just the beginning structure of my analysis and essay, so not everything is gonna be well structured yet.

[Insert Introduction here]

Rhetoric online is very diverse, and for the untrained mind might even be indecipherable. There are many etiquettes and rules to follow, mostly safety procedures put in place to protect users anonymity. However, in recent years these unspoken rules have grown less common, with a sort of emphasis on commodifying the self taking more focus in online communities. This is in part due to the rise in online influencers who occupy the space between celebrities and everyday creative people, and in part due to consumerism and the advertising and emphasis on the self being profitable and marketable (Keeping in mind this also runs through a more individualized westernized online experience). This is one reason why we see a lot of changes in online crip space, and why where these spaces take place matter. The medium of social media changes depending on which platform you are occupying. Twitter is oriented towards short, bite-sized posts, and much like Instagram and Facebook as well, popularity, or the big numbers, are mostly status-based. And sites such as TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr and parts of Youtube, are merit-based, which is to say engaging with an audience is going to be favored. This further ties into the commodification of the self, which is further encouraged by such sites which allow for the audience to further engage with the people behind the screens. But what if you aren’t looking for the big numbers? This is what a majority of social media users experience, so we see smaller communities’ creative rhetoric on these apps as well. All of this context is important to keep in mind because it does influence the rhetoric of the sites. 

For the sake of this project, I want to focus on the length and depth of rhetoric on social media, and how this fosters communities online. I went into this project thinking that the length of discussion usually mirrors its nuance, so it is unlikely to see very complex experiences captured in short-hand, brief posts. However, after reading more into the origin of memes and their connection to genes and evolution and knowledge, I have realized that they are absolute goldmines for rhetoric. 

The similarities between genes and memes are ever-present, in that they both want to survive and multiply, which genes take this to a biological level, and memes a cultural one. Memes rely on complex online contexts, some of which span decades, and it is through this collective knowledge that people online are able to create new meaning in the form of new meme formats or altering and mixing other meme formats. You get something a bit like this:

[Analyse the meme yeehaw]

It is this shared knowledge that people are able to decipher and derive meaning. This meme, captioned by “brain fog be like”, uses this base knowledge of the meme 

When it comes to the disabled community online, there is an expansive amount of information to be found. Within my research I have found two spheres of communities in these spaces. There are a lot of posts that are informational, that are more oriented towards non-disabled people, or people who are new to the online community. They could be helpful to newly-disabled people or people who need information on how to support their disabled friends. The second sphere is more focused towards people in the community. It is founded on the basis that the information found in the first sphere is already known fairly in depth. This foundation is used to have more nuanced discussions, share more specific experiences, and where a lot of the memes are found. For instance, the migraine memes use words like, “brain fog” and autism memes discuss “masking” without feeling the need to explain these words because it is expected of the audience to already be familiar with these terms — usually the audience is people within these communities. There is a generalized knowledge based on common experiences that is used to create relatability and quickly convey a lot of rhetoric. It is the context of this rhetoric that allows it to take shape. 

There is a distinction to be made between yourself in the physical world, the “irl-self”, and the online-self. The anonymity that comes with being online, coupled with its more accessible nature, makes online crip space something very fascinating to consider. Social media is accessible from anywhere with the internet, so long as you have a phone or computer, which makes it especially easy to access. However, some downsides are notable. Lighting of screens could be especially harsh and things like eyestrain and flashing lights are still things people have to look out for. When it comes to crip space, [insert research with sources]

I found more memes on the internet and would like to analyse them as a class together. I’ll be showing them on the board too:

“Found a meme page for my disability and I have never in my life felt more validated and comforted by the fact that my experiences are shared by others who are like me and we can laugh about these things together because they get it.” – shiphappen-s, tumblr

When you sublux a joint(about ehler danlos):