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The cochlear implant question

aeon.co

11–20 of 158 posts

Re: The cochlear implant question

#11

> it is unarguable that only signed languages are easily accessible in all situations Even in the dark? Or at a distance? Or not facing the signer? Or with arthritis? Differently abled folks are entitled to their own culture and beliefs. Yet claims like that seem to be trying too hard to find a silver lining.

I’ve seen two signers on a train platform pause their conversation while one got on the train, then carry on through the window after they’d found a seat. While the article is hyperbolic, there are pros and cons to all modes of communication.

Right, I didn't mean to deny the advantages of signing. Rather point out some arguments are crossing over into absurdity.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#12
Will just say, there are many different causes of Deafness. And therefore outcomes vary a lot depending on what the exact condition is. If the issue is with the auditory nerve for example, cochlear implants won't solve anything. And the whole debate can go in some other direction entirely.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#13

Saying this as someone who is hearing but close to the deaf community in college and knows ASL. By trying to give her the best of both worlds she is going to diminish both worlds. Not fully in the deaf community and not fully in the hearing community.

Who knows what the Deaf community is going to look like in 20 years when this kid is in college. Treatments for hearing loss are advancing and it’s likely that most of her peers will be in a similar position to her. 80% of deaf children born in developed countries receive cochlear implants.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#14
post #4

Saying this as someone who is hearing but close to the deaf community in college and knows ASL. By trying to give her the best of both worlds she is going to diminish both worlds. Not fully in the deaf community and not fully in the hearing community.

An alternative framing would be that she gets to experience both to at least some extent, and isn't that better?

I think a lot of people who have their feet in multiple commonly "either/or" cultures have written quite a lot about the struggle to establish their own identity given those cultures framing many things in terms of, for lack of a better word, sole/primary membership.

I'm not sure anyone can say better or worse, in a useful fashion, objectively - more options can also lead to more ambiguity and stress, as with anything in life.

They're not wrong to say that by necessity, your experience is going to be different if it's defined in terms of choices made before you had agency, that are not mutable - your lived experiences are going to be very different if you cannot hear at all, and spent 10000 hours or w/e framing everything in your life around that, versus being able to hear.

Unfortunately, I think absent something else, this will go the same way as most narratives of cultures where there are utilitarian reasons to not remain in it - people will often choose the route of most visible potential benefit, in these situations.

Something more "ideal", in theory, would be if we could ignore critical periods, and just let people choose in adulthood to learn verbal language, but even that presents the problem that the majority dictates the "easy" option, and by nature, people who are not in that group will sometimes be the ones acting as sandpaper on rough edges in that interaction, as they're not as well-polished. (Look at all the government systems in the US that don't know how to handle more than the common "firstname lastname", for example.) So even that option presents the problems of utilitarian optimization resulting in rational actors just opting out of the more demanding route.

e: Just to be clear, I'm not trying to say I think any of what I just described is "good" - I think homogeneity in human experience deprives everyone of enrichment in the variation of life. But I don't see a way to optimize for this where given the ability, a lot of people don't choose the lower-friction route in their lives.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#15

Saying this as someone who is hearing but close to the deaf community in college and knows ASL. By trying to give her the best of both worlds she is going to diminish both worlds. Not fully in the deaf community and not fully in the hearing community.

Do you think bilingual kids have the same issue? I don’t.

If you spend time around bicultural people or 3rd culture kids you’ll find this is definitely an issue.

Eventually most people figure things out and make the most of it in adulthood, but it definitely makes for teenage/young adult identity crises that monocultural people don’t have to deal with.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#17
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think bilingual kids have the same issue? I don’t.

If you spend time around bicultural people or 3rd culture kids you’ll find this is definitely an issue. Eventually most people figure things out and make the most of it in adulthood, but it definitely makes for teenage/young adult identity crises that monocultural people don’t have to deal with.

I think you’re confusing two things: third culture kids who grow up in multiple places while not feeling at home in any of them; and bilingual kids that grow up in a smaller number of places/one place but still speak multiple languages because of their ancestry, etc.

The former group has more issues fitting in, while the latter seem to be just fine. Certainly plenty of people in Europe speak more than one language natively and don’t feel like they lack a home. And it’s not like there is an actual country where only deaf people exist. So the idea of avoiding bilingualism seems totally absurd to me, especially when probably the majority of the world has some level of bilingualism by default.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#18

Saying this as someone who is hearing but close to the deaf community in college and knows ASL. By trying to give her the best of both worlds she is going to diminish both worlds. Not fully in the deaf community and not fully in the hearing community.

This isn't really a conflict unique to membership in the deaf/hearing communities.

You can be the kid who stayed on the farm or the kid who left the farm for the big city, but you can't be both. You can be the kid who spends half the year on the farm and half in the city, or the kid who went to the big city for twenty years before returning to the farm, but those are different things.

We all only get one life to live. All we can do is try to pick a good path and enjoy the stories from people who picked different paths. A person who picks a hybrid path doesn't get to fully enjoy either path, but they do get to enjoy some of each, and they get to be the storyteller who tells the city kids about the farm and the farm kids about the city.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article talks about the capital-D Deaf community. It’s not just a different language, it’s a different culture.

Language facilitate access to culture. You think that Deaf culture is the only culture you can’t fully participate in without speaking the language?

It is more that there is strong vocal subgroup of the Deaf culture that sees participation in larger speaking community as betrayal.

Re: The cochlear implant question

#20

> it is unarguable that only signed languages are easily accessible in all situations Even in the dark? Or at a distance? Or not facing the signer? Or with arthritis? Differently abled folks are entitled to their own culture and beliefs. Yet claims like that seem to be trying too hard to find a silver lining.

My deaf coworker does not even know sign language, she uses phone for everything. She lives perfectly normal life.

Entire office is not going to learn new language, just to speak with an odd deaf person. And communicating specialized stuff like technical programming is not possible, gestures only cover basic words.

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