[Blindtlk] Nonverbal Communication and Blindness

[Kelby Carlson]

Hey all.

I was reading a post on someone's blog that discussed 
communication and boundary issues, and the author brought up the 
(very prevalent) idea that most, if not all, communication is not 
actually verbal.  She mentioned things such as body language and 
facial expression--the usual kind of things one would dub 
nonverbal communication.  But something has always felt a little 
bit wrong about this to me, since it seems quite ignorant of the 
fact that a good portion of the population (us blind people) 
don't experience "nonverbal communication" in anything like the 
same way as some do, and a large population (deaf and 
hard-of-hearing) do not experience verbal communication.

What I'm trying to say is that I think this view of communication 
can unintentionally marginalize blind people and implicitly 
suggest we simply can't be as good at communicating as other 
"regular" people because we're going to always miss nonverbal 
signals.  Now, there may be some truth in this in certain 
situations; but I just don't buy the argument that my 
communications with people--even those close to me--are so skewed 
that I could literally be missing at least half of what they're 
saying.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? It's something that's 
always bugged me and I haven't really gotten other blind people's 
opinions on it.

Kelby S.  Carlson

Vanderbilt University