- Paper may only be processed wood pulp and pencil strokes only smears of graphite mixed with other materials, but it is the information they convey that is important. The same applies to digital media, too; the words I see on the screen may technically be made up of ones and zeroes, but they convey information to me and you thanks to the emergent nature of media.
- Normative chauvinism is the practice of considering the normal, average or typical person superior to the outlier in some or all cases. They think majorities are better than minorities. These norms can be real averages based on population statistics, or they can be idealised norms (the Body Mass Index). They tend not to listen to the minorities they vilify, since their smugness seals them off from any criticism.
- Making the internet accessible shouldn’t be a pain in the ass. Clearly, the people designing accessibility systems at companies like Adobe see it as an afterthought.
- Personal health and finance websites exemplify the Protestant work ethic and puritanical thinking, delivered in the form of breezy soundbites about clean eating and budgeting.
- This small-minded, supermarket-tabloid obsession with body weight says more about the intellectual bankruptcy of fat-shamers than it does larger people themselves.
- An objectivity measurable outside human perception is unlikely; it is easier to believe in the confluence of eight billion subjectivities.
- People whose learning potential varies significantly from the norm—that is, people with intellectual disabilities and the highly intelligent—have often been characterised as supernatural or unnatural. Rather than being variations on the human theme, they are wrongly cast into a role that separates them from the rest of humankind: the highly intelligent are witches; those with intellectual disabilities, changelings.
- Like good software developers, everyone should use better exception-handling when encountering people whose experiences diverge greatly from the central tendency.
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