In my last post on the Deaf Blogosphere, all of my commenters were optimistic about the future of our online community. But if you look at DeafRead lately, there seems to be a different tone. While some people are indeed touting the message that we can work together towards common goals, others are wondering about a split in the community, and speculating on how deep the divide is. There’s also critical self-examination and navel-gazing going on too; the latest is Carl Schroeder’s post on Deaf community archetypes; his exposition focuses on why we “betray” each other.

Despite the drama and introspection, I think the reality encompasses both, and is slightly more complex than the black-and-white segmentation some people see. One one hand, yes, there are divisions, there are differences; to ignore that is to be unrealistic. But do we need to obsess about these differences constantly? Mishka Zena recently wrote a succinct post stating that she felt this was not necessary, and I agree.

Naturally, there will always be certain areas, topics, and issues that are controversial. Deaf education, obviously, is the Big Enchilada. It’s sort of comparable to abortion– everyone has an opinion, and very few are willing to find a middle ground. That debate is never going to be completely resolved, and the more time we go around and around on it is time taken away from other areas of concern that could be tackled.

This isn’t to say that discussion about Deaf education or reform isn’t needed, or worthwhile. While I have no problem with blog posts, vlog clips, or online forum discussions of ASL, oralism, Cued Speech, bi-bi, and other educational methods, systems, and linguistic uses in the classroom, I see tons of other areas that are sort of shuffled to the side. My concern is there is so much more we could be accomplishing, and we’re not– or if we are, we’re only making incremental steps towards concrete goals.

I celebrated the Deaf Blogosphere the other day. I agree with Deaf Pundit’s assessment of the State of the Blogosphere, January 2008: “People are… gaining awareness and knowledge through that … People will be starting to use their awareness and knowledge to use.”

This is the promise of our corner of cyberspace: the ability to exchange information over long distances, even across continents, and the use of such information to develop awareness and a broader sense of our world that can then be applied in a more practical form off-line. This doesn’t mean we stop acting locally; there never is a substitute in our world for an old-fashioned get-together, where we sit around chatting, brainstorming, and gathering the energy within that group discussion and fashioning it into action. But now we have the potential to act on a larger scale without time constraints. We had a taste of that during the Tent City protests in 2006 at Gallaudet, but imagine if an individual or group harnessed that energy and used it to enact change?

“Sure, that’s already happening,” some of you might say. You’ll point to groups like the Deaf Bilingual Coalition. Ok, that’s great, but again, without getting back into the storm of controversy about the DBC, it’s focusing on that perennial issue, education.

What happened during the recent protest was that our community revisited a lot of issues– there were divisions that appeared, that had been lying underneath the surface, and people picked the scabs off and exposed the angry wounds. While there was a lot of rancor, there was also a chance to start to really examine some of the damage on both sides, and the open aspect of the blogosphere brought in various points-of-view (which continues to be the case). I thought this was necessary, but I also saw the risk in doing so. The danger was that we ended up rehashing a lot of the same arguments again and again, without truly breaking out and tackling the problems and issues we face from a different angle.

Education is an extremely important issue, yes. But what about under- and un-employment? What about communications and captioning issues? What about equal access outside the cocoon of residential schools and programs geared for the Deaf/deaf communities? These are areas and issues where we can definitely find common ground, regardless of which communication method or language we use. These are problems we can find allies within and outside all of our communities. All of us, whether we are late-deafened, prelingually deaf, ASL users, oralists, cued speech users, cochlear implantees, or any combination thereof, face discrimination and frustrations at hiring time and once on the job. Why can’t we discuss these problems and work together to find solutions? The more we do so, the more we can find the commonalities we all have, and reduce the overall number of issues. By doing so, we can perhaps begin to understand each other better and see how each of us adapts in terms of communication. That in turn could foster some possible compromises in deaf education, new avenues in education, or at the very least, tolerance on all sides for opposing viewpoints.

One example of a blogger who’s doing something in this vein is Andrea Shettle, over at Reunify Gally. Although her latest post is on captioning, she’s been writing a lot about the ADA Restoration Act of 2007, a piece of legislation that *all* of us should be concerned with, no matter our childhood background or present-day standing within the community. This is the kind of issue that can unite, rather than divide.

So what do I see for the Deaf Blogosphere? I see continued expansion and contraction of blogs and vlogs, with those that have staying power bringing their perspectives to the table. We can continue our discussions, and I look forward to them. But what I see as the next needed step is to distill the issues we have, deconstruct them, and then concentrate our efforts on each element of each particular topic. From there, we can start to formulate solutions and compromises.

There’s only so many times we can go around and around on the merry-go-round, so many times we can ride the roller coaster. We can all write and read another hundred blog posts and entries on the same old issues. Instead, let’s get off and start using the potential and promise of the blogosphere and scale even greater heights.

Addendum: I forgot to include this when I originally wrote this, but one good example of proactive thinking is this excellent post by LaRonda over at The Ear of My Heart. Do check it out.