The first empirical article from the project has recently been published in the journal Language in Society. You can read the paper for free here.

An overview of the paper

Title: The Neurotypical Listening Subject in Autistic Young People’s Accounts of Participation in Online Affinity Spaces

Authors: Nelya Koteyko, Jessica Aiston, Martine van Driel, and Flo Bremner

Plain language summary

Autistic people’s communication is often wrongly judged as disengaged or impolite. This applies to both verbal (e.g., using direct language, info-dumping) and non-verbal communication (e.g., stimming, low eye contact). In our paper, we wanted to look more into autistic young people’s experiences of communicating online.

We gave an online survey to 144 autistic people and asked questions about their usage of social media. We then analysed the textual responses to the survey questions using frameworks from sociolinguistics. [You can read more about our survey here and here]

Based on our findings, we conceptualise a “neurotypical listening subject.” Autistic people often have to think about the potential neurotypical audience who might be reading their posts. As a result, participants changed how they communicated in order to avoid being negatively judged. For example, participants would add extra emojis into their posts in order to come across as polite. Participants also avoided talking about autism or telling other people they were autistic.

However, some social media spaces allowed participants to be themselves. For example, anonymous or text-based platforms can be more accepting of info-dumping. People also enjoyed platforms where they could share their intense interests and be recognised as experts.

Overall, we argue that social media platforms (and society more broadly!) needs to be more accepting of different ways of communicating and interacting.