Participatory Cultures

New media technology is changing the way we connect to share knowledge and creativity.

It is essential to have a working knowledge of Participatory Cultures - you will need to talk about Participatory Cultures in every Media in the Online Age essay - it is the big idea for this unit.


What is a participatory culture?
one-half of all teens have created media content
One-third of teens who use the Internet have shared what they produced
These teens are involved in what we call participatory cultures
These figures were from 2005; do you think teens are now more or less involved in participatory cultures?

Participatory Cultures

A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civil 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.

A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at least they care what other people think about what they have created).


Forms of participatory culture include:

Affiliations,

Expressions,

Collaborative Problem-Solving

Circulations

Affiliations
memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centred around various forms of media such as Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, Myspace etc.
Expressions
Producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan video making, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups
Laptops have digital editing software as standard. This has unleashed creativity

Broadband has allowed people to share their creativity, in the form of video production.

Collaborative Problem-solving

Working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia and alternative reality gaming.
Circulations

Shaping the flow of media (such as Twitter, podcasting, blogging)