Consuming disability online: a conceptual framework to foster a new ethical inter- action

Thanks to new social media, disability presence is becoming more prominent in popular cul-ture as social networks provide alternative platforms to claim public space and visibility. Thus, digital technologies offer a purposeful rebuilding of the disability narrative, becoming a vessel for democratisation by highlighting the role of influencers with disabilities in raising subor-dinate group consciousness and challenging public discourse and attitudes towards people with disabilities. Plenty of studies exist in the literature on the profile, media, and digital rep-resentation of disabled people. Still, nothing is said about the audience and this new sensitiv-ity that pushes to “consume” disability. While wanting to effect social change is an important starting point, audience reception is crucial to accepting this change. Thus, this paper aims to investigate this “new” mediatic interest, proposing a conceptual framework suitable for analyzing it in its anthropological aspects. Disability then becomes the privileged perspective from which to start a profound rethinking of subjectivity and is the basis for inaugurating a new ethics of the human condition. Another human destiny is taking shape on the threshold of this third millennium, one that demands a more complex humanism that recognizes and values vulnerability as an ontological condition and emphasizes the subject’s fundamental re-lationality. This relationality is one that immediately pushes us to reflect on the ethical modal-ities of “inter-action,” as Kristeva would say, of common and shared action that broadens the concept of care and thrusts into question the forms and meanings of the responses that new digital platforms give to this interest in disability. This study is essential since media values and notions are important to the audience’s worldview, and it is not a simple, straightforward transfer from sender to receiver. Instead, it consists of a complex relationship in which the media reflect reality and shape it. We are at a turning point if we want to continue “being human in a Hyperconnected era.”