Week 7 Blog Post

This week’s readings, chapters five and seven of Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline, focused on different aspects of autistic advocacy in the early days of the internet.

Chapter five begins with a description of Tisoncik’s early activism before becoming acquainted with the term “autism,” and how that both played an important role in her life and would generate experience which she would later use in the founding of autistics.org. Finding the #autism channel on Starlink IRC to be a space dominated by parents and often infantilizing and demeaning towards autistic adults, Tisoncik would instead found an autistic-led channel, #autfriends. This would later lead to the creation of autistics.org, a site for resources for autistic adults instead of just autistic parents, and, in the face of backlash, would become influential in autistic advocacy, such as through graphics which are still in use to this day.

Chapter seven focuses primarily on the concept of neurodiversity and the reorientation towards a model of thought based upon it. In it, a parent of an autistic child creates neurodiversity.com, which functions as a blog on which the idea of neurodiversity can be developed and shared. The author of the blog notices that she recognized many similarities between the way herself and her autistic son thought, influencing her idea that autism represents another way on perceives the world rather than something to be pathologized or “cured.” Using the site that she ran herself, the author achieved great influence, being featured not only in important newspapers and journals but even being called to testify before a court, demonstrating the reach one can achieve through the internet.

The internet, of course, is a tool which can be used for many topics of activism rather than just autistic activism. For my chosen movement, climate justice, it can be used to easily spread stories of the inequity of climate change, and, as a form of mass communication, allows individual people around the world the ability to share their stories far and wide. Similarly, the reach achieved through social media invites not only activists to engage with the subject of climate justice, but also allows people on the periphery to participate and contribute to the movement.