Social media as participatory culture

Participatory culture is a term that we use, describing the involvement of users/audience/consumers in social media. So it could for example be by editing a text in Wikipedia or creating content on youtube etc. This model is often opposed to the mass media and broadcasting model which is more of a typical one sender and several recipients like the newspapers, radio or television. So the difference here is that the audience can be more active and create culture themselves rather than just being passive and listening. What the Internet analyst Clay Shirky, the Australian scholar Axel Bruns and the business consultants Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams all have in common in their statements is that they all talk about the positive aspects of social media. They all point out that these medias are capable of making a change in our culture and make our society more democratic. According to Henry Jenkins spreadable media are on the logic “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead” and in this way, the audience of this media are actively shaping the media flow, and the culture becomes more participatory. Sharing this media in different ways like co-creating, reusing or remixing is according to Jenkins a manifestation of a gift to our economy. What Jenkins is talking about here is that spreadable media is empowering the consumers and is making them an important part of a commodity success. He argues that a long term benefit from this would be an expansion for different brands which will intensify the consumer's loyalty by increasing emotional attachment to this particular brand.

Nadia Ghorbani