Dr. Annamária Fábián

Digital communicative strategies in social media for the inclusion of people with disabilities.

Inclusion and exclusion-related topics rarely make it into the public or private media according to the mechanisms of the “gatekeeper model” in communication studies (Lippmann 1922 and Kepplinger 1998). However, social media and the progressive digitization of communication are leading to the emergence of digitization techniques that give so-called minority topics reach and, following discourses in the social media, are also taken up by the “classic media.” Thus, digitization skills and the elaboration of inclusion- and exclusion-related digitization techniques via digital communicative strategies in social media contribute to the framing of disability and of the lifestyles and necessities that come with living with disability in all its diversity.

Inclusion is thus negotiated in the interactional course in social media in the context of action and discourse in digital space. Social realities and the state of inclusion and exclusion for people with disabilities consequently change via digital communicative strategies in social media. These have an impact on the social, political and economic participation of these people, from which society, politics and business mutually benefit according to studies from sociology, political science and economics. It is postulated that digital communicative strategies from the in-group can influence the perception of people with disabilities in society as a whole.