The Voice Australia (2012): disability, social media and collective intelligence

Abstract

This paper examines themes that emerge in discussion of Season 1 The Voice Australia's vision-impaired contestant Rachael Leahcar on The Voice Australia's official YouTube channel. The essay uses Pierre Lévy's conception of information utopia characterized by collective intelligence as a mechanism to examine the way representations of disability are responded to online. The paper outlines three broad themes that emerged in the available social media discourse about Leahcar's performances: first, themes that portray her as an inspirational sweet innocent, second, accusations that she had a competitive edge or ‘sob story’ that others could not compete with and, finally, that people with disabilities are entitled to compensation.

Social media also offered Rachael Leahcar the opportunity to respond to criticisms that she was not disabled enough – a critique often levelled at people with disability seeking accommodations. This paper argues that although Rachael was broadly constructed and interpreted as a ‘supercripple’, the affordances available through both reality television and television's use of social media provide the opportunity to introduce a different type of representation that embraces both incidentalist and non-incidentalist ways of understanding disability.

Funding

This work was supported by The Australian Research Council [grant number DE130101712].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie Ellis

Katie Ellis is Senior Research Fellow in the Internet Studies Department at Curtin University. She is working on a DECRA funded project researching disability and digital television and has published widely in the area of disability, and digital and networked media. Her recent coauthored book with Debbie Rodan and Pia Lebeck Disability, Obesity and Ageing: Popular Media Identifications (Ashgate 2014), offers further analysis of the social media discussion surrounding The Voice, expanding the critical discussion of disability to include both obesity and ageing discourses. Her other books include Disabling Diversity (2008), Disability and New Media (with Mike Kent, 2011), Disability and the Media (with Gerard Goggin 2015) and Disability and Popular Culture (2014). Katie would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and her colleagues Pia Lebeck and Lauren O'Mahony for their comments on this paper.