In this blogpost I will write about the idea of Participatory Culture, as well as reflect on the criticism made by Van Dijck and Nieborg as well as Fuch in regards of this topic.
Participatory culture
The concept of participatory culture was first introduced by Henry Jenkins in one of his books. According to Jenkins et al. the participatory culture is: „ a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (Jenkins et al. , 2006, p. 3) As explained in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, the participatory culture includes a couple of things: affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem-solving and circulations. Affiliations stand for memberships in communities on different media platforms, either formal or informal such as Facebook, Myspace as well as message boards and online gaming places. Expressions tie to the idea of content creation, such as fanzines, fan video-making, digital sampling etc. The collaborative problem-solving involves formal or informal working in a team and developing new sources of knowledge, such as producing and editing the Wikipedia articles. The last one, circulations, stand for activities that shape the flow of the media, such as creating podcasts or blogging. As pointed out in the white-paper,
A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. (Jenkins et al. , 2006, p. 3)
This paper acknowledges to a certain extend to inequality within the participatory culture. The authors talk about the participation gap, the transparency problem, the ethics challenge. The first one stands for the unequal opportunities, skills and knowledge that disconnects users from full participation. The transparency problem involves all of the challenges that young people, so, potential users face in learning to see the ways that media shape perceptions of the world. (Jenkins et al. 2006) The ethic challenge include the breakdown of the traditional ways of professional training that might result in decreased participation from young users. Unfortunately, as reflected in the criticism by Van Dijck and Nieborg as well as Fuchs, the approach of the authors regarding the inequality and problems that the participatory culture creates, is really vague. I will explore the criticism of those three authors in the following part of this post.
Criticism of participatory culture :
As written by Van Dijck and Nieborg in their article Wikinomics and its Discontents: A Critical Analysis of Web 2.0 Business Manifestos „The hidden ‘magic’ of Web 2.0 technologies remains conspicuously unquestioned by all promoters, whether business gurus or cultural experts. They all claim a brave new world where the spirits of commonality are finally merged with the interests of capitalism.” (Van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009, p. 870) One of the biggest criticism of Van Dijck and Nieborg is that participatory culture creates inequality. They explain that within a network community not everyone is participating at the same level – some people choose to participate, some people choose to completely ignore this option and some people are not given the means to participate, even if they are willing to. Also, even if the people participate in the network, not everyone is equal. For example, Wikipedia awards the people that make the most articles on their website – they are able to moderate, edit and post more content than the participants lower in the ranking. In their article the authors also talk about other phenomenon, not necessarily bad or good – namely „leisure is work”. You don’t have to create specific content,targeted to a specific group – just the fact of creating connections and networks is already very time consuming. Because of the creation of particular groups, you don’t have to conduct specific research when you want to advertise something within the community, as you already know your network. It results in personalized advertisements targeted directly to a particular audience.
The criticism of Fuchs takes a lot from the previously discussed work of Van Dijck and Nieborg. His first issue with the ideas of Jenkins is that he neglects the idea of ownership, and reduces participatory culture without acknowledging the concept of participatory democracy, and that it’s highly political. As he writes:
He (Jenkins) has a culturalistic understanding of participation and ignores the notion of participatory democracy, a term which has political, political economic and cultural dimensions. Jenkins’ definition and use of the term “participatory culture” ignores aspects of participatory democracy(…). (Fuchs, 2014, p. 55)
For Fuchs, Jenkins completely ignores the notion of the company ownership, how they distribute they materials and how they make decisions. Here comes also another point of his criticism – inequality. It primarily talks about what Van Dijck and Nieborg written before – the inequality of the participation, but it also goes to another level cross spreading and resource differences. Because of their wealth, big companies are more visible than the smaller ones, which allows them to gain more profit from their marketing. Because of it, and how their advertising is changing our perception of the world and influencing the popular culture, there is a reinforcement of existing norms. It does not happen in the case of every company and every commercial, but it can have both negative and positive results.
I hope my explanation of the participatory culture, as well as the certain criticisms is clear enough. Unfortunately, this was out last assignment, meaning that the next post will be the last one on this blog. Thank you for reading my stuff, i hope it made you more aware of the media practices and certain phenomena existing within our society. I hope you’ll pop up for my last post. Bye!
Reference list:
Fuchs, C. (2014) Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. (chapter 3)
Van Dijck, J., & Nieborg, D. (2009). Wikinomics and its Discontents: A Critical Analysis of Web 2.0 Business Manifestos. New Media & Society, 11(5), 855-874.