Digital Media Emanicipates Participatory Culture

Participatory culture is not only about the content, but the collaborative opportunity, with everything being experimental, provisional and passing with the process being more important than the product. Participatory culture is a term coined by theorist Henry Jenkins (2009) in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, based on the concept that the affordances of the digital era allow users to “work collaboratively, generate and share ideas and creative works” (p. 10). According to Jenkins, the essence of intellectual growth is a collaborative effort, as compared to segregation of knowledge by individuals and drawing borders between producers and consumers. This ephemerality of the participatory culture makes it a conceptual phenomenon. The participatory culture through its tools and affordances enables global interaction that serves to exponentially expand the worldview of its participants. The digital era provides a platform that brought about a cultural shift towards freedom of expression, creating “affinity spaces” in the form of various online communities, forums, and blogs.

Jenkins asserts, “the participatory culture emancipated by the contemporary digital space shifts focus onto community involvement rather than lock-down of intellect, supporting creating and sharing with others” (p. 6). This signals the rise of open source culture with the advent of UNIX and Linux as platforms, where the code is created, shared and used collaboratively as a non-profit effort, without consumerist motives. In the digital space, the concept of participatory culture can be observed in a variety of socially collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Github, and Pinterest, with each example serving a distinct purpose that caters to its niche users and is feasible through communal effort. The rise of the open-source movement - a culture that allows individuals to freely access, use and share content - established the preconditions for a participatory culture, with the digital era being conducive to its development. The participatory culture contributed in the making of the digital era more democratized. As proliferating technology provides novel affordances for communication, collaboration, and dissemination of ideas, it has given rise to new opportunities for web participants to provide input into the digital space through the creation and sharing of content and ideas. Moreover, the harbingers of participatory culture call for a two-way active model of communication adopted into everyday usage. The old HR model - recruit, train, supervise, retain - is transformed into initiate, engage, collaborate and evolve (Tapscott 2009, p. 149) since the demarcations of success in the digital era are not solely based on individual efforts, but team play, with an ability to collaborate and co-create. An analysis of participatory culture provides an insight into the strengths of the digital era.

References:

Jenkins, H. (2009). Enabling Participation. In Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Tapscott, D. (2009). Grown up digital: How the net generation is changing your world. New York: McGraw-Hill.