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Participatory culture

From active to interactive to participatory audiences

• Recommended Book: Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, by Henry Jenkins
  • Found on Amazon
  • At Amazon’s begin it was an online bookstore, they made the decision that not only could they buy books but they could leave comments on the page
  • Book sellers did not like this as they had their own avenues of selling and moving, they wanted this aspect removed or alternatively they wanted it changed to only show positive reviews
• Comment sections are now a common part of online websites.
  • These sights are in their own small way, a part of participatory culture
• Audience participation in some part is about power, the power to create a shared experience, the power to validate one’s own experience by sharing it with others(posting it online)

Kelty’s 7 dimensions of participation

1. Opportunities for informal learning
2. Involvement in decision-making and goal-setting
3. Control or ownership over resources
4. The voluntary status of the activities and thus the ability to refuse or exit
5. A commitment to supporting individual and collective voice
6. Shared norms or measurements for assessing the quality of each other’s participation
7. Some shared collective experience

AFFECT

• The word of the day/lecture
• Def: Emotion or desire, expecially as influencing behavior or action
  • Or… have an effect on; make a difference to
• Eg. How does lecture affect you? “it makes me feel more informed”
  • “feeling more informed” may manifest its form as confidence in your affirmed understanding in something

Two kinds of Participation touched on in examples in lecture

• Participation in media
• Participation through media

Produser – [producer + user], The blurring or merging of the roles of producer and user in participatory media and/or networked environments

Prosumer – an individual who both consumes and produces

• Key to engagement is interaction, but what kind of interaction?
• Community is at the heart of participatory culture
• Henry Jenkins “has stated that sites such as Youtube falls short of his original concept “
  • Why?
    • Exploitation, “an emphasis of indivdual self-expression rather than a collective understanding of cultural production” and “web 2.0 sites assert ownership over what participants produce and set constraints on how this content can circulate, transforming participation into “exploited labor”
• A lot of particpatory culture starts as audiences then turns to public
  • Audiences are drawn to something while public is something audiences do to

AFFECT!

• Many fans and activists are a part of an affected public
  • Activist communities are organized collectively around shared feelings mixed with their politics, which becomes the foundation of their community
• As stated in the KELTY article, participation is an ambiguous concept
  • Beach towel revolt, Greece

Affect matters, emotional context goes a long way in driving forward collective of activism