I have a problem with people deliberately turning their backs on deaf culture as a result of CI. It's usually parents with their first deaf child who get them a CI from as early as possible and then send them to an oral/aural school where signing is frowned upon, even socially between BSL users in their residences after school. You can successfully integrate deaf culture into a CI user's life, it's not necessary to whisk them away nor pretend they are not deaf. Instead the culture tends to be split, most CI users go to the oral/aural schools and the BSL kids travel miles to a bi-bi school. There are some CI kids in the local bi-bi school and they are very much so accepted, but parents who choose aural/oral have to try somewhat harder with the Deaf community (as opposed to the deaf community).
Well the phone is pretty much dying as a technology. You CAN survive without a phone. Heck, you can use RELAY!!! It would be different if there was no other alternative, but there are tons of alternatives to the telephone.
It depends where you live, when you want to call someone and who that someone is. I can call my
friends on Skype and video-call them in BSL with text side-notes for signs we don't know (we are neither of us first language signers). I can SMS text my husband.
No, the problem comes for me with businesses. They have online web forms where you have to fill in a telephone number. There is no space to write anything but a number, and it will only accept an 11-digit number that starts with a zero (standard format of UK phone number) so it's no good putting in Skype numbers or relay information, you cannot physically do that as it starts with a 1 and has too many digits. There is no way to contact the company to tell them this because what you are filling in is already a "contact us" form! The number of times I have had things like not receiving a delivery because they called to say they were coming and I didn't respond (cos it was an obviously fake number I put there to fill the compulsory box!) or because the phone number was missing. Some forms are not so carefully constructed, so you can write "I am deaf, email me" in them, but you still get companies that leave you sat waiting for a parcel for 3 weeks then you email them to find out what happened and get told they didn't come because you didn't give a phone number.
People who want to call you and have a vested interest in doing so will bother to find technologies that make it possible. People who are sat in a call centre with a list of calls to make don't specially care if they don't get you, and many of them physically do not have another technology there on their desk to attempt to contact you with, they are hired to make phone calls.
Then there is the shortage of relay operators at certain times. If you are in synch with everyone else then great, but if you have relatives and friends elsewhere in the world and you want to make a call at 2am then you can sit for hours for a relay assistant.
Even if VOIP calls became more common with businesses, there is still plenty of my own country with no broadband and no cellphone coverage. Phone may be a dying technology, but it needs to start dying faster and it needs to be replaced with a single, universal replacement that >90% of people have access to, not patchy bits and pieces.
