ABSTRACT
Introduction: Making sense of the world through television, social media and disability Writing in 1978, television scholars John Hartley and John Fiske argued television was ‘rather like the language we speak: taken for granted, but both complex and vital to an understanding of the way human beings have created their world’ (Fiske, 2003, p. 16). Disability theorists likewise recognise disability as a by-product of the way human beings have created their world (Ellis & Kent, 2011; Finkelstein, 1981; Mitchell & Snyder, 2000; Oliver, 1996). Harrington et al. identify social media, and particularly Twitter, as providing an opportunity for researchers to understand how ‘people make sense of the world’ (Harrington, Highfi eld, & Bruns, 2013, p. 406). This chapter takes these observations about television, disability and social media as a starting point to explore the ‘social conversations’ (Nielsen, 2014) about disability occurring on social media regarding television representations and accessibility, focusing in particular on the original video on demand (VOD) Netfl ix series Daredevil . Daredevil is an adaptation of the Marvel comic of the same name. Set in the Marvel universe and centred on vision impaired lawyer by day/superhero-vigilante by night Matt Murdock, the social media activism prompted by the representation of disability has achieved signifi cant results for the accessibility of television to people with disability.
