Get the latest tech news
The cochlear implant question
As the hearing parent of a deaf baby, I’m confronted with an agonising decision: should I give her an implant to help her hear?
Trying to reconcile the contradictory advice given by a new cast of characters – GPs, paediatricians, ENTs, audiologists, speech therapists, disability insurance advisers, interested observers – I took to Instagram to find some clarity in authentic, lived experience. Unlike the normative ‘blend-in-or-else’ dictats of my 1980s childhood, this new world was a sea of diversity – confident smiles, ‘Deaf Gain’ wallpapers, kids signing in slang, and proudly visible, macaron-coloured hearing technology. It’s OK to acknowledge both that the hearing perspective is a muddy lens through which we view the world (and which leads us to valorise auditory pleasures in a way D/deaf people don’t), and that it is OK to want to give one’s child the qualia of soaring strings and voices in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth.
Or read this on Hacker News
