Distance and proximity: research on social media connections in the field of communication disability (editorial)

Social media connects people in digital spaces, affording opportunities for personal, local, and global communication. For some people with severe communication disabilities secondary to lifelong or acquired health conditions social media is a usual part of everyday communication, and may provide a welcome reprieve from the usual “temporal imperative” that “dominates face-to-face communication”. The expressions possible within social media also enable multi-modal communication using text, pictures, and videos to augment or replace face-to-face interactions, and this may be particularly useful to people who cannot rely on natural speech to communicate. Social media and virtual worlds evoke feelings of both distance and proximity between people who share online spaces, and this is reflected in the current field of research on the use of social media by people with communication disabilities.