Perfect Sense (SPOILER)

I have just seen a really interesting film by David MacKenzie "Perfect Sense". The Polish translation of the title is just horrible (terrible title translations is our national sport). It is something like "The last love on the world" :/ Apart from gorgeous Eva Green and Ewan MacGregor the plot is very interesting too, especially in the deaf context.

The story is rather pessimistic one. There are several waves of strange disease striking the humanity. Each attack consists of two phases: first comes the overwhelming emotion (the sadness, rage, hunger, aggressiveness or love) which is followed by the lost of one of the senses. First goes the scent, then taste. The third one the humanity looses is the hearing. Can you imagine? The whole human kind being deaf?

The interesting thing about the film is the adoption process. To each loss people can perfectly adopt sooner or later. The lack of scent and taste can be substituted (in restaurant where the main male character works) with the texture of the food, its humidity or temperature. People still go to the restaurants but are looking for some other experiences then they used to.

The loss of hearing is preceded by the attack of aggressiveness. When infected people wake up after it they realise they are deaf. At first they are being isolated by the services (there are leaflets "If you are deaf stay at home"). They are kept away as unlike the loss of scent and taste deafness is serious loss, that causes the global panic. But even after this plague people can have an ordinary life. With time everything comes back to normal somehow. There are banners in public places with sign language. People are signing in restaurants, they use notes, when attending concerts they are touching the instruments and speakers to feel the sounds.

I am really courious how the Deaf community reacts to this film. On one hand it shows the deafness as a great, horrific loss, a tragedy far more serious than the lack of other senses. On the other hand the idea of deaf humanity is extremely interesting. The deaf communities would lost their uniqueness, the base of their identity and also the ground of their exclusion, but at the same time the whole social life would be organized their way.

I have asked the users of the deaf.pl forum for opinions. I am realy curious what they think about this vision.

The d(D)eaf and the Technology

During my stay at York University the emerging idea of my forthcoming project took more concrete shape. Now I can quite confidently state that the main core of my project is the usage of the technology by the deaf communities in Poland.
There are several tricky issues regarding this topic, that I will consider in the following posts. The first one is the group of the deaf itself. It is a very diverse community. The deaf, are not the same as the Deaf, hard of hearing or people that lost their hearing as adults. In fact all these groups are different and separate to the great extend. It seems that the crucial feature here is the disability. While deafness is very often considered as illness, as a kind of lack the group of Deaf, perceiving themselves as language minority, they won't see their bodies as damaged or disabled because of deafness.
It is very hard to find a common ground for researching and analysing the deaf considering this great difference in self-perception and identity creation. It will be - as I suppose - hard to investigate the technology usage within such a heterogeneous group of people. For sure the Internet usage will be the crucial ground for investigation here (including the usage of social media, vlogging, forums) but also the technologies such as hearing aids or implants will be taken into consideration.
So far I have started the participant observation on one of the most dynamic online deaf community, which is the deaf.pl.