YouTube and deafness: analysis of discourses produced by deaf people in virtual places

ABSTRACT

YouTube and deafness: analysis of discourses produced by deaf people in virtual places

Priscila Soares Vidal Festa

School of Health Biological Sciences, Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná - UTP - Curitiba (PR), Brazil

^{Correspondence}

Festa PSV. YouTube and deafness: analysis of discourses produced by deaf people in virtual places [Thesis]. Curitiba: Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná - Graduate Program in Communication Disorders; 2012.

Currently, YouTube has dominated the segment of online videos in the world, and in Brazil it is not different. Due to the site's visibility, YouTube can be looked as a possibility of expression for a deaf person, as it allows discourses produced in sign language to be registered. This study has the objective to analyze the discourses produced by deaf people and posted on YouTube regarding the themes deaf culture, aspects of the living environment between hearing and deaf and political manifestations. This study's material was composed by 25 videos in which deaf people manifested themselves about deafness. The study offered us data and conditions to consider YouTube as a tool to provide deaf people a new interactive space in their discursive production by establishing interaction. In light of Bakhtin's theory of language, it was possible to identify the social voices present in the discourses, as well as the change in otherness, dialogic, enunciation, heteroglossia and responsiveness. With this study, it was possible to conclude that, on behalf of YouTube, deaf people where able to establish a reason to value "being deaf", which presents the possibility of reconstructing, through sign language, a new opinion about deafness.

Study presented to the Graduate Program in Communication Disorders, Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná - UTP - Curitiba (PR), Brazil, as partial pré-requisite for obtaining the title of Master in Communication Disorders, under supervision of Ana Cristina Guarinello, PhD.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 Jan 2013
• Date of issue
  Dec 2012