General Article 'Work-bound' people and digital travel

Topic Selected: Social Media
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One of the research foci of our project[1] is the usage of social media among disabled, house-bound people. As the profile of Dr Karamath in Tales from Facebook (Miller 2011), and the story of Amanda Baggs in Digital Anthropology (Ginsburg 2013) suggest, social media, or Internet in a broader context, allow disabled people a ‘bigger’ life. For example, allowing people to express themselves better, to communicate with friends more conveniently, and even gain a ‘second life’. Even though I have encountered people who have disabled relatives in their rural hometowns and heard people talking about disability caused by factory work, so far in my field site I have only met one person who has a slight problem in his left leg. I found that it is difficult to find similar examples of appropriation of digital technology among disabled persons at my field site given that most residents live here for the purpose of working.

However, from time to time I witnessed another kind of ‘bound’ situati...

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