ABSTRACT
In 1980, scholar and disability activist Vic Finkelstein wrote that in a not too distant future ‘impaired persons will … no longer be oppressed by disabling social conventions and disabling environments but will be absorbed in the mainstream of social interactions’ (p. 37). At the centre of his vision there was a strong belief in the transformative potential of technological development. In particular, he hypothesised that Information and Communication Technologies would facilitate the empowerment of disabled people. Yet, more than three decades later, there is still a real dearth of empirical work on the relationship between new media and disability activism, and an exhaustive debate on the impact of the Internet on disabled people’s exclusion from public life is yet to be had. As such, this chapter investigates whether the Internet provides disabled users with channels to discuss, organise and pursue political action by focusing directly on the experience of British disability rights campaigners who have integrated online communications in their repertoires at a time of turmoil.
