ABSTRACT
Disability and disabled people are thus represented at the nexus of both medical and social models of disability, and as crisscrossed by legal and governmental discourses. This chapter provides key media and technology studies concerns about access and inclusion into contact with the emerging fields that contend with the political economy of new media, including critical algorithm studies, surveillance studies and theories of free labour. Search engine algorithms also, in general, reflect dominant – that is, medical – models, and, in light of the big data capture that the search engine Google performs, help entrench such medical and ableist models. John Cheney-Lippold has developed the concept of "algorithmic identities" to delineate that traditional identity categories are refigured through virtual algorithmic processes that infer, with lightning speed, how to categorise the data that circulate through them. Algorithms are justified by ideologies of efficiency and speed, concepts disability theory has long viewed as problematic.
