Media, Technology & Culture 08 (3rd Edition): Participatory Technologies

There seems to be widespread consensus that contemporary media is much more participatory. For some time, this was a point of celebration: anyone could, for example, set up a YouTube account, and with relatively low-cost or even free devices and software, generate and share their experiences or views with minimal censorious intervention. Recently, however, participatory media cultures have become a point of worry. That we now live in a mediated world where nobody seems able to agree on what were once pretty basic facts. And also, where this additional mediated participation is not necessarily all that liberating, but rather, a new avenue of surveillance, manipulation and ultimately power at the hands of governments, corporations and influential individuals. Whether one celebrates or worries about it, there are also different perspectives on where this participatory media culture comes from. Some have explained it with reference to the capacities of new technologies. After all, people can participate more easily when so many communication functions are collapsed into an internet-enabled device like a smartphone. And yet, for others, this technological explanation is flawed, underplaying longer-term cultural shifts, which new technologies might more properly be seen as crystallizing. In this episode, we begin with work by thinkers such as Henry Jenkins, who have notably opposed technological explanations for a participatory media culture, suggesting it is instead a momentous cultural shift towards new and potentially democratising forms of 'collective intelligence' that blur the old distinction between media ‘producers’ and ‘audiences’. We will consider the value of this perspective, while also questioning whether insisting on ‘culture’ bring us back to the same unsustainable technology/culture dichotomy we have challenged in earlier episodes. This includes addressing arguments that today’s so-called post-truth politics should be seen as a peculiar constellation of participatory culture and the technical affordances of social media platforms.

Thinkers Discussed: Tim Dwyer (Media Convergence); Lev Manovich (Software Takes Command); Ithiel de Sola Pool (Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age); Thomas Friedman (Thank you for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations); Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide); Axel Bruns (Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage); Pierre Lévy (Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace); Bernard Stiegler (The Economy of Contribution); Jose Van Dijck (Users Like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content); Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne and Tamar Tembeck (The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age); Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene); Limor Shifman (Memes in Digital Culture); Noam Gal, Limor Shifman and Zohar Kamph (‘It Gets Better’: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective Identity); Jason Hannan (Trolling Ourselves to Death? Social Media and Post-Truth Politics); Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business).