ABSTRACT
This chapter explores disability's central role in what Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green describe as spreadable media, a phenomenon that is changing the makeup of the media industry. It moves to consider the increasing importance of spreadable media in the current online environment. Spreadable media leverages emotion to create viral content people pass content from person to person through social networking sites at a rapid pace because it has somehow infected them, like a virus. The chapter continues the discussion of inspirational images of disability to bring together participatory cultures and spreadable media to offer a case study analysis of the rise and critique of so-called inspiration porn. It discusses people with disability making and distributing web series online as an example of an alternative media world, outside the confines of media framing, ritual and hierarchy. However, discourses of disability associated with charity, inspiration and existential guilt continue to dominate online as the social spam of twenty-first century.
