Participatory Culture With Social Media
According to Henry Jenkins, the media scholar who originally come up with the idea of the participatory culture theory, in his paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, participatory culture is defined as “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.” It’s the idea that people not only only read/watch/listen to what is on the internet, but they also contribute to the topic whether through an interaction with the original piece, or creating their own product from it and sharing it on the internet as well. Social media plays a significant role in that as it connects the world and easily allows people to interact with each other. People can make their own content to publish on the internet such as posting a video they created on YouTube, or they can do something as simple as liking someone else’s tweet on Twitter. It’s the idea of actively participating with the internet rather than only being a consumer of the content the internet offers.
Personally, I have many social media accounts including Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok, and so many other platforms in which I can interact with people. Most of the time, I interact with the internet for entertainment reasons whether that be a comment on a YouTube video or a reply to a tweet that I felt like I had something fun to add to the conversation even if no one else really interacted with it. One of the sites I interact with others the most on is Twitch where I watch people’s livestreams and interact with them by talking in chat or following the streamer because I found them funny or interesting. I like staying up to date with what my friends are doing and being able to engage in a quick conversation with them no matter where either of us are. I have friends that I engage in participatory culture with daily as they live in other states or even countries but can see what they’re up to by simply following them on social media.
Since the start of COVID, I have definitely become more digitally literate and found myself engaging in participatory culture more and more as it’s one of the easiest ways to interact with others and still stay apart. I have found myself spending more time on the internet as the idea of being able to interact with others on the internet is extremely inciting when you can’t see each other in person for safety or by choice. Isolation has definitely brought even more people online to be involved in participatory culture all in their own ways. Personally, I became a lot more active on social media as I wanted to be able to still have social interaction with people other than the people I lived with. I began to interact with friends more on Twitter and just in general spend more time on social media.
However, around the world, people have used participatory culture in ways that affect the world. In 2000, people in the Philippines were able to organize protests that led to the impeachment of their then President, Joseph Estrada. By taking advantage of participatory culture, they were able to get the story spread to mass media and organize their own protests that made Estrada lose support of the military and become ousted by a coup. It shows the power that interacting with others through social media or just on the internet can have. This form of culture has the power to completely change a government, so who’s to say it can’t lead to even more significant changes in the future.
Here’s a video that is both an example and an explanation of what participatory culture is.
