How the internet is changing the lives of disabled people.
As part of the BBC Superpower season bbcrussian.com set up a blog called Open Access. Disabled people from Samara, a town on the river Volga, agreed to write a dairy describing their experience on the internet. Anna Vissens of bbcrussian has compiled some of their entries.
Igor Glushenkov
There is lots of information on the internet - some of it is useful, interesting and truthful, some of it - pretty horrific. Take for instance an article published by a popular Russian newspaper which proposes to eliminate children born with a disability right in the maternity ward.
I have lived with cerebral palsy for 50 years and have heard so much nonsense that I have stopped paying attention.
But then the other day I got a call from a friend, also living with cerebral palsy. She tearfully told me that an article had been published proposing to kill disabled people.
She was unimpressed by my arguments about democracy, the freedom to write anything and the freedom not to read what has been written by others.
Then I started getting calls from other disabled friends. They were asking me: what are we to do now? Are we next?
Alexander Tibatin
People say that they only play foreign exchange markets online to boost their family budget
But they are not quite telling the truth.
Playing games is a way people to unwind, to hope to realize the unrealized potential, to return to the careless childhood.
Online my gladiator avatar has won.
I turn off the monitor and I return from Ancient Greece to the present. The Winter Olympics have just finished in Canada. The Russians have done poorly.
Maybe they should make a new computer game. Where our figure skater Yevgeny Plushchenko is number one, where we triumph over the Canadians in hockey and where our guys win gold in the biathlon.
But all these victories are only possible in the virtual, not the real world.
Valentina Plotnikova
I don't have enough time to explore everything I would like to. I do not understand people who say that they are bored.
I struggled to send my first e-mail to the BBC. The text I typed disappeared and I had to type it again. Everything I do in the Internet I do slowly and I lack confidence too.
I received a reply from the BBC - I was very happy to have this proof that the internet is working indeed.
When I tried to save my text I hit a wrong button by accident... Sergei helps me when I am stuck. He is very patient. I would like to know computers like he does.
Sergei Graponin. (Sergei was paralyzed in a shooting accident while serving army 33 years ago. He trains other bloggers to use the internet talking with them on the phone.)
On of the people I am training called me the other day. Her friends loaned her their old computer and she is now learning to touch-type.
And then a problem arose: she had removed the learn-to-touch-type CD from the CD drive too early and the programme "froze" on her screen.
We used the Ctrl-Alt-Delete command to resolve the problem and at the same time encountered a new one - not enough disc space.
I suggested that we remove some redundant programme. We chose to get rid of the latest programme that had been in use - her little nephew had been playing "Puzzles".
I spent the rest of the evening worrying about that nephew of hers. I had infringed on that little person's rights to privacy. At night this little boy appeared to me in a dream and threatened, without removing the chewing gum from his mouth: "I'll get back at you, you puzzle destroyer!" I could not reply anything to him. I felt numb. My nervous system must have shut down. It must have been some kind of virus.
Tomorrow I will warn my trainee not to use the internet until she has installed anti-virus software.
Natasha Pronina
I have written lots of letters in my life and now I can say that these were written the old-fashioned way - using paper, a pen, an envelope and stamps.
There is a something charming about those letters - written by hand, put into an envelope and having travelled the long journey from one person to another. And now here comes the new way to write letters - electronic mail, its main advantage being the speed of delivery.
Recently I had another amazing internet moment. I recalled a song which I heard 27 years ago on a tape recorder. That song had really touched me, but I only remembered a couple of words from it. I typed them into the search engine and here was the song.
Another amazing thing about the internet is that it has given me an opportunity to get in touch with long lost friends.
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