I received an interesting e-mail from a friend who attended a lecture on disability studies. The scholar delivering the lecture commented that one of current trends in disability studies is the historical analyses of the lives of people with disabilities. Researchers are searching for diaries and other documents that might provide insight into the daily existences of people with disabilities in decades and centuries past. And that got me thinking about blogs and their potential value as primary sources for future generations of scholars. The abundance of disability blogs could serve as a treasure trove of information on the lives of people with disabilities in the early twenty-first century. To be sure, blogs alone would not provide a complete picture of the disability experience at this point in history. A substantial number of people with disabilities lack Internet access and it would be both arrogant and foolish to think that bloggers are representative of the larger disability community.
Still, blogs have intrinsic historical value and I’d suggest that it might be worth some enterprising grad student’s time to start creating an archive of disability blogs. It would be a shame to lose a lot of the content out there simply because the author stopped maintaining his or her site. Quick, somebody write a grant proposal.
In order to have real historical value, a person, disabled or not, who writes a diary, should also write about the painful things of his days. It’s my opinion that when a diary-writer feels some shame about what he’s writing down, this is an indication the ideas he’s about to formulate have exceptional value for future “researchers”.
But I’m really glad your life is so interesting Marc.
I’m not disabled myself, at least not in a way anybody -except me and some intimi -knows, and my (25 or so) diary-books might also be used in the future. I hope so. From time to time I even write about money, or about politics.
Mieke.