pIJ/Volume 9 - Issue 1/2024 ISSN: 2499-1333 1 Media and Disability – Part I: Organizing between bodies and technologies DOMENICO NAPOLITANO Scuola Superiore Meridionale d.napolitano@ssmeridionale.it DAVID FRIEDRICH University of Western Australia david.friedrich@research.uwa.edu.au NETA ALEXANDER Colgate University nalexander@colgate.edu “The future is disabled” headlines techno-society scientist Ashley Shew in their introduction for the MIT Technology Review issue “All Access” (2023). By advocating for “all-access thinking and disabled expertise”, Shew (2023) sees a “more livable world” for every member of society in the future: “We need more ways to be. Part of that involves looking to alternative ways of sensing, processing, moving, understanding, and communicating, and seeing those ways as good and worthwhile.” Based on the accounts of disability-related technologies, Shew discusses the hype around “enabling“ technologies — usually propagated as positive — which, after all, do not address the actual problem and “fail to understand that these communities may pursue their own desires rather than those reflected in the dominant culture” (Shew, 2023). Or, to put it differently: The real problem is not solely the media technology itself, but its strange entanglement with the dominant culture from which it emerges. What does this mean? According to sound studies scholars Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne (2017), media technologies are built around an understanding and a definition of “the natures of human subjects and bodies” (p. 371). This is in line with media scientist Friedrich A. Kittler’s work, who argues in Optische Medien [Optical Media] that (early) media technologies were developed by and for disabled people (2002, p. 158). In other words, a particular idea of a human body is — or was — understood as “norm-al”, leading to the formulation of a “norm” from which media technologies are derived. This relationship also applies vice versa: Not only do technologies emerge based on supposed normal bodies, but the technology itself generates the norm through its operations (Friedrich, 2021). Take, for instance, the audiometer. An audiometer is a technological device to measure “normal hearing“. By providing the test subject with an audio signal via headphones, the audiologist generates an individual audiogram based on the feedback provided by the subject. Depending on the feedback given, the audiologist defines the degree of hearing compared to