From "Outsider" To "Insider"

In today’s era,with its dominant features of visualization and emotion,images challenge the monopoly of words in information dissemination and media practice,becoming a global "universal language",and mankind has entered the "era of image hegemony".In the 1960 s,the Canadian scholar Mc Luhan put forward the classic thesis that "the medium is an extension of man".Today,society should not only pay attention to how the media is produced by people,but also how the media affects people,that is,"people are an extension of the media".This research focuses on the "outsiders" in the image age-the visually impaired,proposes the concept of "audio-visual",and uses the methods of in-depth interviews and case analysis to explore how audio-visual enters the daily life of the visually impaired and how it extends the body of the visually impaired.This study believes that visually impaired people indirectly contact image media through the special form of "audio-visual",and then carry out physical practice with the image itself,gradually forming "insiders".The study found that audio-visual media technology has re-extended the formation of the body of the visually impaired,and this extension is internalized and rooted in the individual’s life experience.Compared with the text era,the bodies of the visually impaired have undergone changes,including the way of obtaining information,the way of life,and the iteration and update of social identity.Visually impaired people reach the world of images through audio-visual media and extend their bodies.This extension includes both the physical extension of the sense body and the extension of the social body to connect with the outside world.However,these audio-visual media practices also exposed the difficulties of visually impaired people in reading pictures,the complexity of audio-visual decoding,barrier-free annotations without emotion,and social barriers caused by popular visual symbols,which reflect the social visual hegemony behind these problems.Ideological discrimination and identification of visually impaired groups.Further,this study takes the integration and extension of visually impaired groups in the era of image hegemony as a research topic,which is not only a dialogue with media extension theory,but also enlightens the digital integration of minority groups in the era of new media technology.