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

Perhaps you need to come up with your own definitions of what counts as participation for you?