ABSTRACT
Introduction Online communities and blogs are increasingly popular among autistic 1 people and have even become the touchstones of ‘autism culture’ and ‘autism-and neurodiversity-advocacy’. In this chapter, we will indicate how autobiographical narratives and self-representations have infl uenced the conceptualisation of autism in the second half of the twentieth century. The advent of the internet continues this tradition, but lowers the threshold, making the forum broadly available for a wide range of subjects on the spectrum. The internet greatly facilitates social interaction, community and advocacy, but our focus is more on the specifi c advantages and limitations of individual internet use for people living on the spectrum. Moreover, we will also examine some of the implications of computer and internet metaphors to describe an autistic mind. In a close reading of the popular Flemish blog or ‘sailing diary’ of Tistje – a young man on the spectrum who plays an important role in the Belgian autism self-advocacy movement – supplemented with data from participatory observation and online interviewing (Brownlow & O’Dell, 2002), we explore how autism can be read, reproduced and reconsidered in this digital fi eld. 2 We examine what blogging means for Tistje, how it affects his sense of social connection and his sense of self and whether there is any overlap between online and offl ine worlds. In so doing, we not only focus on the specifi c content of this online autie-biography, 3 but we also pay attention to the creative and material (or formal) aspects of the blog. This will bring us, ultimately, to the question of whether the blog can be read as a kind of ‘prosthesis’ in the cultural sense of the term (Coffey, 2004) of an autistic mind.
