Thursday, April 1, 2010

Is there a Hard of Hearing culture?

So I was reading Shanna Groves' comments over at her Lip Reader blog (see link to your right under my blog list). She was talking about the concept of a hard of hearing culture, which I think is an interesting concept.

What makes a culture? To me it's a group of people sharing a collective way of doing things, with traditions and generally a common language. Take Deaf culture for example. In Shanna's blog she says "The Deaf culture is something its participants are proud of, a culture with a shared ASL language and communication style that goes back many years".

So a culture shares a set of common things. It has an identity. People who are hard of hearing may have different ways of communicating. I for one, communicate orally, use hearing aids, lip reading and I watch a person's body language and gesturing when they speak. I've also started watching movies with the captions on because I find it easier to watch without having to concentrate on every word so much.
There are lots of different ways to communicate - direct sign language, orally, having a sign language interpreter, lipreading, using various assistive listening devices such as FM systems and hearing aids etc.

Keeping all this in mind, does a hard of hearing culture exist, given the varying communication methods? If one does exist, what does it look like? What are the collective things that make it a culture? I think a culture can be built on the fact that there are things which are unique to certain people. Eg. I have never felt part of the hearing community because I don't have fully functioning hearing, nor do I feel a part of the Deaf community as I don't know how to sign (yet!) and I've never shared in that culture.
To make things more confusing, I generally hear well in quiet environments but am pretty much deaf in noisy ones with lots of background noise. I feel like I'm in the middle. Just some food for thought.