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The below is my presentation notes. I didn’t follow it word for word, and added other things that came to mind during the presentation. Overall, I think I did OK

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How many of you had an email address in 1988? Raise your hands if you had an email address in 1988.I know that everyone of you have email nowadays. Raise your hands if you do NOT have email address today.

Now think about technological tools that have helped, enabled and empowered us. I will be going through some of them.

I got my first email address upon admission in college in 1995. The main functions of email are reply, reply all, delete and the these two functions are important: read and forward. Someone could be at home here in Washington D.C. reading the Washington Post newspaper. If it was something exciting, that person could type something about the news article and send it to friends. Those people could forward it to others and so on. I estimate that I and most people get a couple forwarded emails a day or week. How many of you saw more forwards during the heights of the gallaudet protests? More forwards popped in our inboxes.

Now think about the web. I was also first introduced to the web around the time I received my first email address. Thankfully that was also when i started learning how to make web pages. In the early days, the sites that covered the big issues, namely the protest, were few. The Washington Post. There were a few deaf run websites, but hardly any of them stayed online for very long. It was difficult for them to gather information quickly. It was difficult for readers to submit articles and pictures. The web was more closed back then, and inaccessible to many people who had the potential of distributing information.

Now think about openness. Emails are sent and received only to and from people you knew. Websites are more open that anyone could find them. Website addresses and specific articles, could be easily forwarded via emails. The web has matured and new technologies have emerged based on the web. More openness. the web became easier to maintain and owning websites became insanely cheaper. In 2000, it cost $30 a month for a basic web hosting package; today it costs under $5 a month. And there are so much more offered. One of them are blogs.

Blogging is a simple concept: it is an easy way to publish content. Anyone can open a blog with a free service. Anyone can open a blog for free at blog.deafread.com. Login. Write. Publish.

Again about openness. Blogs can be found on the internet by anyone. It can be forwarded to anyone. If anyone got their hands on pictures, it could be easily uploaded and published. If a student caught an protest-related incident on film, that person could easily publish to his own blog, or find a friend who does. This is amateur, underground and independent media at best.

Vlogs greatly improved accessibility to information to all. Meanwhile, this preserves ASL. Vlogs are the next thing. Have you seen George Veditz signing in a video from 1913. I was inspired. The name of the video was “The preservation of sign language”. Imagine future generations being inspired by the vlogs you create today.

Could this be any more open? Yes. Aggregators. The power of one is important through the blog concept. There are many blogs out there. Not all of them are found. Powerful articles pop here and there on various blogs. Aggregators summaries each of those articles and puts them on one page. If you think about it, this is more closed than blogs are; but because of the technological tool aggregators provides, it really helps blogs get out there and blossom. Many more blogs were found. Instead of remembering blogs, aggregators brought them all together and remembered for you. A blog could be set up and quickly get loads of visitors–all of this in 5 minutes. Before aggregators, this was next to impossible.

The deaf community’s aggregator is DeafRead. We started on July 14, 2006 with four blogs. By noon, we had 12 blogs. The rest was history…until Black Friday, when it was really history. Traffic was astronomical. On the day the Board of Trustees announced Dr. Jane Fernandes’ termination, people went to DeafRead 30,000 times in a single day. Many blogs saw their highest traffic.

Now we are 200 blogs strong and growing.

The number of active blogs could decrease as issues cool and die out, but do not get comfortable in your throne. As soon as something happens, blogs will start popping up everywhere. Blogs and vlogs are technological tools; the true power lies in the people.