Participatory culture: History and Key Facts

Participatory culture, an opposing concept to consumer culture, is a culture in which consumers act as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media.

Modern technological advancements (mostly personal computers and the Internet) have enabled private persons to create and publish media, usually through the Internet. Since technology enables new forms of expression and engagement in public discourse, participatory culture supports individual creation and informal relationships that pair novices with experts. This new culture, as it relates to the Internet, has been described as Web 2.0. In participatory culture, "young people creatively respond to a plethora of electronic signals and cultural commodities in ways that surprise their makers, finding meanings and identities never meant to be there and defying simple nostrums that bewail the manipulation or passivity of 'consumers'."

The increasing availability of the Internet increasingly enables people to work collaboratively, generate and disseminate news, ideas, and creative works, and connect with people who share similar goals and interests (see affinity groups). The potential of participatory culture for civic engagement and creative expression has been investigated by media scholar Henry Jenkins. In 2009, Jenkins and co-authors Ravi Purushotma, Katie Clinton, Margaret Weigel and Alice Robison authored a white paper entitled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. This paper describes a participatory culture as one:

With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Participatory culture by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.