Having done a bit more digging into the history and origins of the Action for Children autism ad, and having read a few more responses to said ad, I'm beginning to get a sense of why this kind of thing needs to be addressed critically.
(I stand by what I said in my previous post about not wanting to presume that an autistic person expressing views different from mine must have been "coerced" into stating those views.
Certainly coercion and undue influence happen, but without concrete evidence of their happening I don't figure I have any business claiming knowledge that they did happen.)
But: one thing I hadn't really considered in writing my previous post was the fact that (as Sharon pointed out in a comment on my prior post), this was not a matter of Dan reflecting on his experiences on his own blog or other individually-generated publication.
(I would love to hear what Dan has to say for himself -- meaning, what he'd say if he wasn't being called upon to advertise for "Action for Children", and if his expressed thoughts were not filtered through the marketing lens -- but I haven't yet.)
Rather, it was a matter of a charity organization deciding to self-promote, hiring an ad agency, and orchestrating an advertisement. There may have indeed been some solicitation of actual client input -- but there were also marketing folks and even "art directors" involved in the generation of the ad.
Hence, the result cannot be viewed only as "Dan's own words about his own experiences", but as the result of the efforts of people whose job it is to come up with novel ways of sending particular messages in eye-catching ways.
So, again, while I will not claim to know what Dan actually thinks (and while I would never ever suggest that he should change his own message to be more in line with what I think), I am definitely willing to state that I think the campaign is missing the mark.
"Action for Children" may not have meant for the ad to portray autistic children as "monstrous" (or in need of institutionalization to "civilize" them), but that seems to be the predominant interpretation of the ad based on almost all the commentary I've seen so far.
Good intentions don't put any charity's actions above reproach or criticism, and if "Action for Children" really wants to stand behind their stated aim of helping vulnerable youth, they have an obligation to listen to those who are pointing out the potentially harmful effects of the imagery and message in their advertisements.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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9 comments:
Anne, I love your blog, and I wanted to pick your brain about something.
You are involved in both autistic self-advocacy and transhumanism. A central plank of the transhumanist movement is the promotion of human evolution through germline genetic engineering. My reading of transhumanists like Dvorsky and Hughes suggests they would strongly suggest that parents use technologies to ensure that their children do not have disabilities, including deafness, blindness, and cognitive disabilities.
Many people with Deafness might see Deaf as a culture, just as non-neurotypicals may call autism a difference rather than a disability, and yet the logical outcome of germline genetic engineering would be to eliminate the possibility that children would be born with differences like Deafness or autism/Asperger syndrome. This is especially true since it is largely people WITHOUT these differences who will be making the choices. I would anticipate more and more self-selected standardization.
I'm curious about your thoughts about this.
Um, wow, maybe I need to put up a more prominent statement about this -- no, I am not involved in "transhumanism" at this point. I used to apply that term to myself, but then I got tired of the baggage associated with it. Including the stealth-eugenics stuff that some (not all, but enough to be a problem for me) transhumanists were trying to defend all the time.
If you go back through the blog archives here you can see a *lot* of my thoughts on the very issues you bring up, as well as my very waffly and tentative/tenuous relationship with the transhumanist subculture.
I know that different people are at different points on their individual philosophical existential learning-about-the-world journey so I do not immediately reject the views now of people who happen to be calling themselves transhumanists now (and am thankful for those who did not reject *my* views or assume I had nothing to say when I was calling myself that, even if they thought it very silly). But, I am most definitely not self-identifying as "transhumanist" these days. There's nothing about being interested in longevity and robots and cyborg body parts and whatnot that beholds anyone to a highly self-referential (and irritatingly insular) subculture such as transhumanism.
Thanks for the clarification.
I'll have to work my way back through the archives I look forward to seeing how you grappled with those issues; I think my confusion stemmed from the fact I bumped into your profile on the transhumanists.org social networking site.
If one were to attempt to draw a Venn diagram of all the people who had once called themselves transhumanists, or had belonged to the WTA, but had now branched out to become something slightly different, it would be immensely complicated. It seems like one of the least cohesive social movements imaginable.
Go Democrats said:
[Transhumanism] seems like one of the least cohesive social movements imaginable.
To quote Kurt Vonnegut: "If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon."
Hi--I wonder if you knew that Action for Children has made another ad that parents with MS find almost as horrifying as people in the Autistic community find Dan's ad: I haven't seen it (I'm not in the UK), but I gather it has a young girl forced to care of her Mum because her Mum has MS. And Action for Children helps her. Parents are angered because it comes across as if children are always carers for disabled parents (when they don't, or shouldn't have to).
The Facebook group focused on the MS parent ad is at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=51200447470
I've done a little digging on the ad agency involved - posted over on my blog.
The whole campaign is thoroughly off-key and just plain failing by any reasonable metric.
Their failure to engage in discussions with us is simply raising the temperature further.
Socrates: Thanks for the update. The amount of really bad judgment that keeps coming out wrt. this campaign is pretty astounding. :/
(and of course I mean bad judgment on Action for Children's and the ad agency's parts!)
George Carlin, undoubtedly one of the best comedians/social critics in recent history, was often accused of being "mean" or too angry. But anger comes from sadness, most often, and I think that he was rather heroic. Many of the issues he was addressing are what was/is truly mean. But rather than accept any conclusions of the sort, in a desperate attempt to feel clean, or mentally at ease, he was targeted and labeled a "meany" by a bunch of fair-weather types, many of whom followed his work when it made them look cool. I'm sure he knew that his intentions would be misconstrued in the way that they were, and he didn't mind, because he knew that if he didn't muster up the uncommon will to address the issues that were/are truly monstrous, it could be some time before anyone else would be in a position to do it so effectively.
Take for instance his stand-up entitled, "You are all diseased." Then consider that everyone suffers from some degree of disorder, most often many disorders at the same time. Multi-personality, stress-related, obsessive compulsive,..the list goes on. We're a mess, from the loftiest to the humblest. But many of these "conditions" have also come to be known as personality traits. The world is a terribly wonderful, ironic place. Comedy is the only real way to come to terms with it. Did you know that there are psychologists, whose only patients, are other psychologists!?
It's worth that considering, that for all intents and purposes, this really is the "best of all possible worlds." That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to do better.
I haven't researched this campaign, but I bet that it's not entirely a horror story, whose #1 employment requirement is monsterhood. Think of how many other people/places have been portrayed in a similar light, only for people to later find an entirely different scenario, that's just not as sensationally appealing.
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