Participatory culture

Participatory culture is a neologism in reference of, but opposite to a Consumer culture — in other words a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media. Recent advances in technologies (mostly personal computers and the internet) have enabled private persons to create and publish such media, usually through the internet. This new culture as it relates to the internet has been described as Web 2.0.

The internet has come to play an integral part in the expansion of participatory culture because of its ability to reach large populations of people in a comparatively small amount of time. The potential of participatory culture has been investigated by professor Henry Jenkins of MIT.

Participatory Culture and Technology

As technology continues to expand the number of ways that communication may take place it has also increased the opportunities for consumers to create their own content. Barriers like time and money are beginning to become less significant to large groups of consumers. For example, the creation of movies once required large amounts of expensive equipment, but now movie clips can be made with equipment that is affordable to a growing number of people. The ease with which consumers create new material has also grown. Extensive knowledge of computer programming is no longer necessary to create content on the internet.

Relationship to Web 2.0

Not only has hardware increased the individual's ability to submit content to the internet so that it may be reached by a wide audience, but in addition numerous internet sites have increased access. Websites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and Facebook encourage the submission of content to the internet. They increase the ease with which a user may post content by allowing them to submit information even if they only have an internet browser. The need for additional software is eliminated. These websites also serve to create online community provides motive for the production of content. These communities and their web services have been labelled as part of Web 2.0.O'Reilly, Tim. (2005-09-30). What Is Web 2.0. O'Reilly Network. Retrieved on 2007-05-01]

Potential Benefits of Participatory culture

Participatory culture has been hailed by some as a way to reform communication and enhance the quality of media. According to professor Henry Jenkins, participatory culture is beneficial because it increases the number of those who produce media and increases the amount of competition. Competition forces producers to pay more attention to the needs of consumers who can turn to other sources for information.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture:Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8147-4281-5] As participation becomes easier, the diversity of voices that can be heard also increases. At one time only a few mass media giants controlled most of the information that flowed into the homes of the public, but with the advance of technology even a single person has the ability to spread information around the world. The diversification of media has benefits because in cases where the control of media becomes concentrated it gives those who have control the ability to influence the opinions and information that flows to the public domain.Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale, 2006. ISBN 0-3001-1056-1] Media concentration provides opportunity for corruption, but as information continues to become accessed from more and more places it becomes increasingly difficult to control the flow of information to the will of an agenda. Participatory Culture is also seen as a more democratic form of communication as it stimulates the audience to take an active part because they can input their own ideas and assume a less passive role.Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale, 2006. ISBN 0-3001-1056-1] The democratic tendency lent to communication by participatory culture allows new models of production that are not based on a hierarchical standard. In the face of increased participation, the traditional hierarchies will not disappear, but "Community, collaboration, and self-organization" can become the foundation of corporations as powerful alternatives.Tapscott, Don. Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics:How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin USA: New York, 2006. ISBN 1-5918-4138-0] Although there may be no real hierarchy evident in many collaborative websites, their ability to form large pools of collective intelligence is not compromised.

Potential Drawbacks of Participatory Cultures

All people want to be a consumer in some and an active contributor in other situations. Being a consumer or active contributor is not an attribute of a person, but of a context Fischer, G. (2002) Beyond 'Couch Potatoes': From Consumers to Designers and Active Contributors, in FirstMonday (Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet), Available at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_12/fischer/] . The important criteria that needs to be taken into account is personally meaningful activities. Participatory cultures empower humans to be active contributors in personally meaningful activities. The drawback of such cultures is that they may force humans to cope with the burden of being an active contributor in personally irrelevant activities.This trade-off can be illustrated with the potential and drawbacks of "Do-It-Yourself Societies": starting with self-service restaurants and self-service gas stations a few decades ago, and this trend has been greatly accelerated over the last 10 years. Through modern tools (including electronic commerce supported by the Web), humans are empowered to do many tasks themselves that were done previously by skilled domain workers serving as agents and intermediaries. While this shift provides power, freedom, and control to customers (e.g., banking can be done at any time of the day with ATMs, and from any location with the Web), it has led also to some less desirable consequences. People may consider some of these tasks not very meaningful personally and therefore would be more than content with a consumer role. Aside from simple tasks that require a small or no learning effort, customers lack the experience the professionals have acquired and maintained through daily use of systems, and the broad background knowledge to do these tasks efficiently and effectively. The tools used to do these tasks — banking, travel reservations, buying airline tickets, checking out groceries at the supermarket — are core technologies for the professionals, but occasional technologies for the customers. This will put a new, substantial burden on customers rather than having skilled domain workers doing these tasks.

Meta-Design: A Design Methodology Supporting Participatory Cultures

Metadesign is “design for designers” Fischer, G., & Giaccardi, E. (2006) "Meta-Design: A Framework for the Future of End User Development." In H. Lieberman, F. Paternò, & V. Wulf (Eds.).End User Development: Empowering People to Flexibly Employ Advanced Information and Communication Technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 427-457] It represents an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which participatory cultures can come alive and new forms of collaborative design can take place. It extends the traditional notion of system design beyond the original development of a system to allow users become co-designers and co-developers. It is grounded in the basic assumption that future uses and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time, when a system is developed. Users, at use time, will discover mismatches between their needs and the support that an existing system can provide for them. These mismatches will lead to breakdowns that serve as potential sources of new insights, new knowledge, and new understanding.Meta-design supports participatory cultures as follows:
# Making changes must seem possible: Contributors should not be intimidated and should not have the impression that they are incapable of making changes; the more users become convinced that changes are not as difficult as they think they are, the more they may be willing to participate.
# Changes must be technically feasible: If a system is closed, then contributors cannot make any changes; as a necessary prerequisite, there needs to be possibilities and mechanisms for extension.
# Benefits must be perceived: Contributors have to believe that what they get in return justifies the investment they make. The benefits perceived may vary and can include: professional benefits (helping for one’s own work), social benefits (increased status in a community, possibilities for jobs), and personal benefits (engaging in fun activities).
# The environments must support tasks that people engage in: The best environments will not succeed if they are focused on activities that people do rarely or consider of marginal value.
# Low barriers must exist to sharing changes: Evolutionary growth is greatly accelerated in systems in which participants can share changes and keep track of multiple versions easily. If sharing is difficult, it creates an unnecessary burden that participants are unwilling to overcome.

Educational Implications of Participatory Cultures

Cultures are substantially defined by their media and their tools for thinking, working, learning, and collaborating. Unfortunately a large number of new media are designed to see humans only as consumers; and people, particularly young people in educational institutions, form mindsets based on their exposure to specific media.The current mindset about learning, teaching, and education is dominated by a view in which teaching is often fitted "into a mold in which a single, presumably omniscient teacher explicitly tells or shows presumably unknowing learners something they presumably know nothing about" (Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA ] . A critical challenge is a reformulation and reconceptualization of this impoverished and misleading conception. Learning should not take place in a separate phase and in a separate place, but should be integrated into people's lives allowing them to construct solutions to their own problems. As they experience breakdowns in doing so, they should be able to learn on demand by gaining access to directly relevant information. The direct usefulness of new knowledge for actual problem situations greatly improves the motivation to learn the new material because the time and effort invested in learning are immediately worthwhile for the task at hand — not merely for some putative long-term gain. In order to create active contributor mindsets serving as the foundation of participatory cultures, learning cannot be restricted to finding knowledge that is "out there". Rather than serving as the "reproductive organ of a consumer society" Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society, Harper and Row, New York, ] educational institutions must cultivate the development of a active contributor mindset by creating habits, tools and skills that help people become empowered and willing to actively contribute to the design of their lives and communities.Beyond supporting contributions from individual designers, educational institutions need to build a culture and mindset of sharing, supported by effective technologies and sustained by personal motivation to occasionally work for the benefit of groups and communities. This includes finding ways for people to see work done for the benefits of others being "on-task", rather than as extra work for which there is no recognition and no reward.

ee also

*Prosumer
*The Long Tail
*Remix culture
*Hypersociability
*Transmedia storytelling
*Affinity spaces
*Constructed World

References

External links

* [http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning]
* [http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/10/confronting_the_challenges_of.html Henry Jenkins Weblog Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century]