Mobilität und Tuning-Prozesse. Zur Reorganisation materiell-sensorischer Praktiken blinder Fußgänger:innen durch digitale Medien

Abstract

The mobility of blind people with long canes is currently increasingly reorganised by elements such as smartphones, voice output, apps or headphones and in this respect represents a digital media practice that requires learning, practice and a knowledge-based coordination of simultaneous practices, bodily techniques and heterogeneous things. This paper explores this form of mobility and elaborates its distributed sensory character. Locomotion flanked by long canes, smartphones and headphones is described with Pickering (1995) as a tuning process that is situated and practically produced and proves to be constitutive for the production of urban space in terms of urban practices.