On participation
This may not be the right time or place, but I’m struggling with the notion of participation and participatory culture in general. Don’t you find that also a concept not without its complexities? IMO it does signal a blurring of the boundaries between production and consumption, and a subversion of established hierarchies of cultural value and authority. But does it have to be about the ‘co-production of texts’ such as modding, fan fiction, sampling? How would it relate to for instance interactivity? Hence, what would then criteria be for participation?
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January 30th, 2005 at 10:10 am
Many postmodern and audience theorists (John Fiske in Television Culture for example) believe that all or at least many acts of consumption are also creative acts even if no new material product is created. The consumer uses the stuff they consume for their own purposes - for their identity projects for example.
Perhaps you need to come up with your own definitions of what counts as participation for you?
January 31st, 2005 at 9:53 am
Is participation not an either/or but a spectrum of participation and production perhaps?
February 3rd, 2005 at 8:03 am
Or, is participation an illusion?
Maybe it would be useful to focus on why “participation” is meant to be a good thing, and in what ways, in order to be able to narrow your definition of participation to something you can defend. For example, we defend an active participant in the political process because of our view about how the government should work in a democratic society. We defend an active participant in business because of our views of how the economy should work in a capitalist society. Is participation a good because it leads to creative self-expression, to a more democratic society, or to greater wealth?
And also, at least according to what Nick Couldry said when reviewing his empirical evidence at the seminar last week, sometimes people never feel there’s any POINT to participating, since they have no place to “perform” their expertise or their knowledge of the news. So, participation for whom and about what?
I personally am inclined to believe that participation will be very unequally distributed across the population, so that participatory culture may well be bourgeois culture for a certain segment. But I’d be happy to be proved wrong.
EVC