Technology Is Helping The Deaf Hear, But at What Cost?

In Part 4 of this four-part series, we explore disability in the digital age: how tech is offering new solutions—and new questions—for the future of human interaction.

Al-Sayyid village, an isolated community in Israel’s Negev Desert, has long embraced technology. In this area with what is believed to have the highest concentration of congenital deafness in the world, smartphones are an essential communication tool. At the grocery store or in the schoolyard, children use video chat to sign to their parents about what time they’re coming home or if they’re bringing friends over for dinner. The ubiquity of the condition means that deafness here carries none of the stigmas seen in much of the world.

But al-Sayyid’s intimate deaf–hearing dynamic is being tested, as more parents have chosen to have their children undergo cochlear implant surgery, in which an electronic device is implanted within the ear to simulate sound.

Mohammad al-Sayyid, a skinny, buoyant, and effusively polite 13-year-old boy, wears a cochlear implant discreetly tucked behind his ear, much like an external hearing aid. Mohammad says he’s glad his parents decided to give him the surgery when he was two years old, after learning that he was deaf.