Participatory Culture in a Networked Era

A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics

Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, danah boyd

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745689432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the last two decades, both the conception and the practice of participatory culture have been transformed by the new affordances enabled by digital, networked, and mobile technologies. This exciting new book explores that transformation by bringing together three leading figures in conversation. Jenkins, Ito and boyd examine the ways in which our personal and professional lives are shaped by experiences interacting with and around emerging media. Stressing the social and cultural contexts of participation, the authors describe the process of diversification and mainstreaming that has transformed participatory culture. They advocate a move beyond individualized personal expression and argue for an ethos of "doing it together" in addition to "doing it yourself." Participatory Culture in a Networked Era will interest students and scholars of digital media and their impact on society and will engage readers in a broader dialogue and conversation about their own participatory practices in this digital age.

Chapter 1
Defining Participatory Culture

Introduction by Henry Jenkins

More and more organizations, institutions, and businesses have embraced a rhetoric of participation, yet it is abundantly clear that not all forms of participation are equally meaningful or empowering. Many of the core debates of our time center around the terms of our participation: whether meaningful participation can occur under corporately controlled circumstances, when our ability to create and share content is divorced from our capacity to participate in the governance of the platforms through which that content circulates. Does participation become exploitation when it takes place on commercial platforms where others are making money off our participation and where we often do not even own the culture we are producing?

I first used the phrase “participatory culture” in Textual Poachers (Jenkins 1992), when I was contrasting participation with spectatorship; I was really only making descriptive claims about the cultural logic of fandom. Poachers described fans (in this case, mostly female fans of science fiction and other genre television programs) not simply as consumers of mass-produced content but also as a creative community that took its raw materials from commercial entertainment texts and appropriated and remixed them as the basis for their own creative culture. My book showcased the relationship between fans, texts, and producers but also the social relations that emerged within fandom as fans created a shared space where their own creative and critical interventions could be appropriately valued. This account of fan culture drew heavily on my own experiences of almost twenty years, at that point, of involvement in fan communities.

My ideas about culture come from Raymond Williams (1958), who defines culture as “ordinary,” the “sum total of human experience,” as everything that we as humans create or do together, from the most mundane aspects of our everyday lives to the most cherished expression of our artistic accomplishments or sacred beliefs. So, for me, a participatory culture describes what are sometimes very ordinary aspects of our lives in the digital age. A participatory culture is one which embraces the values of diversity and democracy through every aspect of our interactions with each other – one which assumes that we are capable of making decisions, collectively and individually, and that we should have the capacity to express ourselves through a broad range of different forms and practices.

My initial use of “participatory culture” to refer to fandom (Jenkins 1992) relied on a not fully conscious blurring between forms of cultural production and forms of social exchange; fans understood fandom to be an informal “community” defined around notions of equality, reciprocity, sociality, and diversity. The fans had a clear and (largely) shared understanding of what they were participating in and how their production and circulation of media content contributed to their shared well-being. And there was a clear tension between their culture and that of the commercial industries from which they took their raw materials. In this context, there are strong links between interpretation, production, curation, and circulation as potentially meaningful forms of participation.

The world I described in Textual Poachers was undergoing transition, as a community based on photocopiers, the postal service, and face-to-face encounters was giving way to electronically networked communications. At the same time, I was undergoing my own transition, starting work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1989 during the first phases of the digital revolution. My work on fandom came out, for example, alongside Howard Rheingold’s early writings about virtual communities (Rheingold 1993). At MIT, I had a ringside seat for debates about the role of new media in education, the promises of digital democracy, and the creative potentials of hypertext and interactive games. More and more people were using the concept of participatory culture to describe the new forms of cultural production and media-sharing that were taking shape in the early days of the internet. Much of what I was seeing in the emerging cyberculture reminded me of my own experiences in fandom. Critics of Convergence Culture (2006) have argued that I saw the new media landscape as fandom writ large, and I suspect this is a more or less fair criticism of where I was at when I wrote the book. I was not wrong to see fandom as one important element shaping contemporary participatory culture. Fans were often early adopters of new media platforms and practices and experimenters with modes of media-making. They were historically among the first to interact within geographically dispersed communities of interest. But they were simply one among many different kinds of communities that had been struggling throughout the twentieth century to gain greater access to the means of cultural production and circulation.

By the time I became involved in the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative in 2005, my thinking about participatory culture operated on a much different scope and scale. I saw us entering an era when the public, at least in the developed world, would have access to much greater communicative capacity than ever before, where a growing number of institutions were embracing more participatory practices, and where the skills and knowledge to participate meaningfully were unevenly distributed. I examined a range of different sites of participatory culture in order to identify the ways they were supporting peer-to-peer mentorship and were encouraging and scaffolding participants as they refined their skills and developed greater confidence in their own voices. The white paper Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Jenkins et al. 2007), written for MacArthur, was addressed to educators and adopted a definition of participatory culture that places a strong emphasis on its pedagogical potentials:

A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Embracing Participatory Culture

Mimi: I was very influenced by Henry’s work on fandom and his early writing on gaming when I was doing my dissertation work on children’s software. It empowered me to pursue work on the participatory dimensions of media culture at a time when digital and online media were still emergent and not the focus of much scholarly attention. Back then, I wouldn’t have positioned Henry as a researcher in my field of learning sciences, but I already saw the relevance. I was thrilled when he started doing more and more work that was explicitly educational, looking to participatory culture for a set of positive values for learning and literacy. It was probably overdetermined by our backgrounds and interests, but Henry, Howard Rheingold, and I found ourselves seeing similar kinds of opportunities for participation and learning emerging from new digital and networked media. Where Henry focused on fans, I’ve tended to focus on geeks, but it feels part of a similar family and a shared tendency to celebrate certain kinds of activated media engagements.

Unlike Henry, however, I came at these issues through the learning sciences, not media studies. As a graduate student at Stanford, I worked out of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL), where Lave and Wenger (1991) had written their Situated Learning book together. IRL was a research institute that focused on social and cultural studies of learning. Unlike traditional views of learning, which focus on pouring content into the heads of kids in a standardized and individualized way, this approach sees learning as an act of participation in communities of shared culture and practice. These theories of learning and participation grew out of anthropological work in settings where learning is embedded in the everyday life of communities rather than sequestered into educational institutions, and it’s not accidental that we’ve all found ourselves working at a similar intersection. And we’ve benefited from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative giving us a context and resources for working together.

danah: I was first exposed to the notion of “participatory culture” when I took classes from Henry in graduate school at MIT. Then I moved to San Francisco in January 2003 and embedded myself within a network of entrepreneurs and geeks who would go on to form the startups that became the backbone of what is now described as “Web 2.0.” The emic language used in these crowds was that of “user-generated content.” As I listened to what they were envisioning and what they were trying to create, I realized that the startup scene was imagining many of the same things that Henry had turned me on to. Initially, this crowd had many of the same sensibilities as the fan communities that Henry encountered – subcultural resistance mixed with the particular narratives of liberty that Biella Coleman (2013) picks up on in Coding Freedom, where there was a political desire to have software be free as in freedom, not free as in beer. But a lot of this is now forgotten. Where we’re sitting now – with Facebook having become a public company, marketers trying to make memes go viral, and social media being a worldwide phenomenon – it’s hard to remember what San Francisco was like even a few years ago.

Mimi: Ideas about participatory culture and communities of practice have spread and morphed radically in the years since I was in graduate school. What was once a set of theories at the margins of academia is now part of a common vocabulary in some sectors of the industry and in much of media studies and the learning sciences. As a more wide-ranging set of players started to engage with these ideas, it has forced a set of conversations about what counts as participatory culture or a community of practice. For example, many of the early studies of situated learning and communities of practice centered on relatively defined, face-to-face professional communities, such as tailors (Lave 2011), butchers (Lave and Wenger 1991), and copier technicians (Orr 1996). What does it mean to apply these ideas about learning and participation to classrooms, online communities, and large corporate work teams? Now an acronym, “CoPs,” communities of practice have become a familiar buzzword among managers seeking to build cohesion and sharing in work teams. These shifts have been a source of consternation to some of the pioneers in situated learning theory who feel the ideas have been watered down or misappropriated. It’s heartening to see these frameworks resonate more broadly, but they’ve also fallen victim to their own success. Can we hold onto the core values that animated the early years of situated learning theory and participatory culture while also appreciating how they have spread and evolved?

Henry: I came to Lave and Wenger and the other CoP thinkers somewhat later. My own initial thinking about education and participation was influenced early on by one of my MIT colleagues, Seymour Papert. Papert (1975) had written about his visit to a samba school in Rio. The samba schools were informal gathering places where people living in a community developed their performances for next year’s carnival. Papert stressed the informal circumstances through which dancers of very different levels of experience collaborated to construct collective performances. He asked whether educators might incorporate some of those same processes into the design and practice of schooling. Papert celebrated these moments of collective creativity, in part because his whole constructivist education paradigm emphasizes active participation and de-emphasizes formalized teaching.

When I went to Rio a few years ago, I visited one of the samba schools and I came away with a clearer sense of what Papert was talking about. At any given moment, there are many different modes of engagement: some are watching and observing, waiting to participate, while others are on the floor dancing and others are much more peripheral, watching from the balcony and texting their friends. There are announcers on a sound system actively soliciting participation, coaxing shy community members onto the dance floor. At one point, a group of people in what looked like police or military uniforms step-marched through the space, grabbing people they suspected of not contributing to the collective effort. Eager to avoid being “arrested,” I asked my host what to do, and he suggested putting on a festive T-shirt we had been given at the door. He figured that, even if I couldn’t dance, I could at least be decorative. This was a great reminder both of the many different ways participants might contribute and of the need sometimes to invite, encourage, and, in this case, even coerce participation rather than take it for granted.

Mimi: Most forms of learning are much more integrated with the dynamic life of communities than our current formal education system. The samba school is a nice example of that. Even in our postindustrial society, most learning is still seamless with everyday life and sociability, whether it is picking up our first language, learning to cook, or figuring out how to build a house in Minecraft. The challenge is when these different modes of learning collide. Kids fail in their studies or get left out from collective practices because they don’t have the necessary cultural knowledge or experience. Most educational settings aren’t as successful as the samba school at meeting learners where they are and inviting different contributions. Whether it is in a classroom or a professional community of practice, we often see exclusion and marginality operating in less friendly ways when different ways of doing things butt up against one another. Often those dynamics that promote the cohesion of the “in” group are also barriers to entry for learners and newcomers.

Henry: As the samba school example reminds us, many core principles of participatory learning might have been understood by previous generations of folk artists. My grandmother was a remix artist: she was a quilter. She would take bits of remaindered cloth from the local textile mills and use them to create something new. She was able to express herself meaningfully through the appropriation and recombination of borrowed materials. She would have learned these skills informally, observing the community of quilting women as they worked, gradually trying her own hands at the craft and learning through doing. Skills, knowledge, and traditions were passed from generation to generation.

These forms of creative expression were woven into the practices of everyday life. Yet, she was living in a society that was segregated by class and race and, in this case, also by gender. For her, quilting would have been her entry into a white, working-class, female culture, a source of solidarity with others in her community, but hardly open to all. And it is hard to visit the samba schools and not see them in relation to the economic and educational poverty and often racial segregation that surrounds them. So, in some ways, our goal of more diverse and inclusive communities of practice sets higher standards than anyone had achieved in the past.

That said, we might see the samba schools as an example of the ways aspects of traditional folk cultures persist in the eras of mass media and digital culture. As I suggested in Convergence Culture (Jenkins 2006), folk culture was disrupted by the rise of mass spectator culture across the twentieth century, but some aspects are returning in an age of digital culture. I am often asked whether all cultures are participatory, and the answer is that different configurations of culture invite or enable different degrees of participation. With digital culture, more people are making media and sharing what they made with each other. Grassroots and amateur forms of expression gained much greater visibility. Just as my grandmother took bits ...