It is especially important to appreciate the circumstantial concept of disability in the cyberspace era. Cyberspace offers an opportunity to level the playing field for individuals with disabilities for several reasons. First, the number of tasks that can be accomplished via cyberspace is increasing daily and will continue to multiply at rapid rates for the foreseeable future. Second, disabilities are invisible in cyberspace. Third, no stigma attaches to using the tools of cyberspace. Individuals who find it crucial to use cyberspace because of a disability will not be perceived as different from individuals who find it convenient for any other reason. Finally, cyberspace, depending as it does on digital convergence, can, in principle at least, facilitate the need for different forms of input and output. All of these points gain in importance, in the context of the Americans with Disabilities Act; cyberspace provides a structure that can be used to help make many ``reasonable accommodations'' to the needs of individuals with disabilities.
To argue these points we want to demonstrate that cyberspace is a giant
step in the extension of what we call ``accomplishment
space''.
We will say a goal is in a person's accomplishment space if it is something he or she can intentionally accomplish. That is, a) there is some sequence of movements the person can execute, which in the person's circumstances, will be a way of bringing about the goal, and b) the person has, or has a way of getting, the information about the circumstances required to know what to do to accomplish the goal.
What we'll call primitive accomplishment-space includes only accomplishments that are done without the help of tools or the intervention of other people--accomplishments like reaching out, picking up an apple and eating it. These acts will involve effects on our immediate environment, guided by the information we can pick up from our senses. At one time human agents lived and worked mainly in primitive accomplishment space. Perhaps at that time the intrinsic concept of disability would have been appropriate.
But today we all live in extended accomplishment space. One way to extend our accomplishment space is through communication. Mary sits in the living room, and asks her husband in the kitchen if there is an apple in the bowl there. She is able to find out relevant facts about the space beyond her senses. If he says ``yes'' she may ask him to wash it and bring it to her. She has an effect on things she cannot reach.
Another way of extending accomplishment space is through tools. If Mary had a long pole, she might be able to shake loose apples high on a tree. Tools magnify or transform the effects of a human movement, giving a movement a quite different effect than it would have otherwise, and changing the shape of accomplishment space. Without the pole Mary's movement would not been a way of getting an apple, but only a way of looking silly, as if she were gesturing to the apple tree. With the pole, executing this movement is a way of getting the apple to fall.
A third way is through infrastructure. Suppose that steps have been nailed to the tree. Mary has to move her limbs in a certain ``climbing'' way to use this bit of infrastructure. Moving her legs in that way wouldn't be a way of doing much of anything without the steps, but with them, it is a way of climbing high into the tree.
Although we find the distinction between tools and infrastructure
useful, it is hardly clear and precise. We think of tools as closely
related to certain effectors (``moving parts'') and types of
movements of them. The tool-user learns that certain movements, with the tool
in position, have new effects. These become, if not additional basic
movements, very low level actions, that the agent can perform at will
in a wide variety of circumstances, with many different ends-in-view.
And we think of tools as paradigmatically portable and often personal,
traveling with an agent, and staying with the same agent. Thus a
wheelchair is a tool, that provides a way of moving in various
directions by moving one's arms in certain ways.
Infrastructure is paradigmatically associated with a structure, and accessible to many agents. A bit of infrastructure changes the effects of movements made by agents that use it, but not in ways that are closely tied to particular effectors and kinds of movements. A ramp is a part of the infrastructure of a building. Everyone can use it. Some walk up and down it, some roll up and down it.
In between paradigmatic tools and paradigmatic bits of infrastructure
there are many intermediate cases. If Mary carries a rope ladder with
her, it will have some of the feature of tools and some of the
features of infrastructure.
The internet is creating large changes in accomplishment space for those who have access to it. Assume Mary lives and works in California. Mary wants to order a book from a publisher in Europe. She finds the fax number on the internet, and then faxes an order for the book, providing her Visa number so that her account can be charged. As a result of her actions in California, various things happen in Europe. Someone pulls the book off the shelf, wraps it, and sends it to her. Mary made these things happen; the movements of the person in Europe are the intentional, planned result of the movements of Mary's fingers in California.
In terms of the movements that are executed, Mary's acts in this case are not much more complicated than eating an apple. But they are much more complicated in the structure on which they depend. The success of Mary's actions depends on the telephone cable and microwave connections that made it possible for her to pick up information on the web and send an order via fax. They also depend on the cultural institutions and commercial mechanisms that make communication via language possible, and the commercial mechanisms that make credit cards possible. When she is operating in cyberspace, using internet, telephone and fax, Mary can obtain information from places she cannot perceive, and affect events that are thousands of miles beyond her reach. Her accomplishment space is immense.
Note that the basic structure of action is the same in this case as in eating the apple. Mary has a goal: bringing it about that someone in Europe send her a certain book. She has a way of bringing that about: faxing the order with the Visa number entered. She has a way of finding out the information necessary to fax, so that the order will get to the right hands: look up the number on the World Wide Web. And she has the capacity suit her action to the facts--to dial the number that will get the fax to the right person.
Cyberspace is thus the accomplishment-space created by a huge infrastructure that accommodates communication--communication among people and communication among people and all of the information nodes (web pages, airline schedules, commodities vendors, libraries, etc.) that are stored on the network of computers. Cyberspace is the latest stage in a long process of extending ``accomplishment-space'' beyond the limitations of our natural senses and abilities.
In general, the more our accomplishment space is extended by communication, tools and infrastructure, the less appropriate the intrinsic conception of disability becomes. It should have been obsolete by the 1930's, when Roosevelt had to cover up his wheelchair use. It deserves to be a dimly remembered fossil in the era of cyberspace.