Self-Advocacy and the Digital Divide

I live so much within online networks that it can be baffling to bridge that gap between the virtual and the visceral. We have so much power for communication and dissemination of information here in the virtual, and yet, we are most often advocating for things that exist physically, that can be touched, smelled, that happen outside the computer. Firing an abusive staff member, getting appropriate dental care, accessing affordable housing with sufficient support for a high quality of life--all of these are things that exist within the visceral. Effective advocacy work here requires finding some way to bridge that divide, to harness the power of information and online community for physical-world impact. How?

Computers and Internet make my life possible. I rely on my computer to communicate, to preform tasks that fall into the chasms of my learning disabilities, and to replace a large number of executive function skills I never managed to develop. My computer is what enables me to do self-advocacy work, both offline as my voice and online as my connection to the greater advocacy community. Through text based, asynchronous interfaces, no one dismisses me based on the strangeness of my appearance, and no one knows how much I struggle with my pronouns.

But I have little to ability interface with self-advocates and self-advocacy organizations that don't work well within the 'net. For organizations that are older, or people who lack literacy (computer or otherwise), or who were discouraged from using technology, or who simply don't feel comfortable, I'm left without a common interface. I can email all day long, but interactive telephone calls are beyond my capacity to manage. I look at these more viscerally-based self-advocacy groups and see that they have something which I do not--they have a strong network of resources for real-world action. They can pick up the phone and tell someone what they need.

I've been struggling for a while now to invent an interface between the power of the my online community to instantly inform a world of advocates, and the (mostly inaccessible to me) direct effectiveness of a face-to-face speech in front of a senator. I've found too that these off-line based self-advocacy groups have been struggling in the other direction: they need my communication networks, just as much as I need their off-line resources.

1. What are the barriers to empowering off-line self-advocates with online technology, and how to overcome them?

2. What are the barriers to integrating online self-advocates with off-line communities, and how to over come them?

3. How does any activist community cross that rift between information and sensation; how does what we do here, online, translate into concrete impact here, in the physical space where we sit reading this post?

4. When does it make more sense to build coalitions of online and off-line empowered organizations to share resources instead of teaching specific individuals new skills?

I've no immediate answer to any of these questions, but I do have a very, very deep interest in getting them answered.