Examining our imagination about the future is important, in part, for what it reveals about the present. According to Alison Kafer (2013), whose work on crip time we explored earlier in this module, “the imagined future invoked in popular culture, academic theory, and politics movements” allow us to “trace the ways in which compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness and compulsory heterosexuality intertwine in the service of normativity” (p. 17).

Our purpose now is to look at advertisements for technology that promise to bring us into that future, one that we are led to believe will be faster, more efficient, and more productive then the present. Though these advertisements don’t depict the future, or the present, in an obvious way, they do each express their own norms, biases, and values.

In Restricted Access, Elizabeth Ellcessor (2016) analyzes the iPad commercial above, noting the way women are framed as less technologically competent than men — they “already know how to use it,” no additional technology learning required —  and describing the class markers such as business-wear and leisure time that signal that screen technology is targeted at middle- and upper-class users. We want to think about advertisements along similar lines as Ellcessor, paying close attention to what their messages might imply for disability, and the relationship between disability and technology.

When examining our mockup ads below, consider what we have already discussed about crip-time and cripping technology. Recall how cripping technoscience and time both draw attention to a cultural obsession with speed, size, and productivity. What role do advertisements like those below have in reinforcing this obsession, and how might they be encouraging society to think of disability, slowness, and mental or embodied difference, as shortcomings which need to be ‘fixed’?

Consider, too, what we have proposed about a possible future, and possible role for technology, wherein disabled people are not ‘fixed’, ‘made faster’, or ‘made more productive’ using technology, but instead enabled to live within their particular embodiments.

We’re now going to analyze the ideology of communications technology in advertising. The constructed advertisements in this activity draw inspiration from an array of back-to-school, telecommunication, computer, mobile device, and software promotions.

To analyze these advertisements, consider the questions in the box below. Pay attention to the represented or suggested relationship between technology and bodies, how disability does or does not enter the frame, and what kinds of ideologies underscore these ads for telecommunication companies—both their services and their digital devices.