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382 Participatory Culture Melissa Brough Participatory cultures have existed in many historical contexts, but the increasingly decentralized access to producing content in the digital media landscape has facilitated their growth, diversification of forms, and impact. fi Participatory culture is e now a widely used term in both the academic and the commercial sectors, most often describing the cultural practices that develop around a network’s capacity for producing and sharing content. Yet the term has a much longer history and cultural relevance. In media studies, Henry Jenkins began applying the term participatory culture to the e study of fan cultures in the late 1980s. However, Jenkins was more explicit about the characteristics of participatory culture in later work, including Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (with David Thorburn), in which he described media consumers participating in “the archiving, annotation, appropriation, transformation, and recirculation of media content. Participatory culture refers to the new style of consumerism that emerges in this [new media] environment” (2004, 286) (see old media /new media). With his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jenkins further developed the concept in relation to learning in the digital media era. “For the moment ,” they write, “let’s define participatory culture as one fi ■ With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement; ■ With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others; ■ With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices; ■ Where members believe that their contributions matter; and ■ Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.” (Jenkins et al. 2006, 7). This definition is now the most widely cited among scholars and researchers of digital fi culture. In media studies more broadly, participatory culture has often been used to describe cultural communities and practices that actively (rather than passively) engage with popular culture, such as fan cultures that remix (see remix) or produce their own content in response to, or in dialogue with, mass media content. Jenkins’s use of the term stems P 383 Participatory Culture directly from his early work on fandom. His landmark book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992) analyzed fans’ active and participatory media cone sumption as they reconfigured cultural meanings by “poaching” from mass media con- fi tent, thus challenging traditional notions of the passive audience (see fan fiction). While practiced by fandom for decades, Jenkins argues that participatory culture has spread far beyond fan communities because of the intersection of new media technologies , the proliferation of do-it-yourself (DIY) subcultures, and “economic trends favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates [that] encourage the flow of images, fl ideas, and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active modes of spectatorship” (2006, 136). Participatory culture is thus characterized by active participants rather than passive audiences, whose practices often blur the line between production and consumption— prompting the use of terms like “produsage” (Bruns 2008). Similar to alternative media, access and ability to produce one’s own content are central to participatory culture. An important distinction, however, is that Jenkins’s conceptualization of participatory culture includes how audiences may engage with popular culture and mass media content, whereas alternative media defines itself in opposition to these. For decades, alternative fi and “citizens” media have employed the concept of participatory media production to highlight their democratic, grassroots, and horizontal approaches to production as distinct from—and outside of—commercial mass media (Downing 2000; Rodriguez 2001). In contrast, Jenkins and others have studied how pop culture content is appropriated and remixed for political meaning making, especially among youth; this phenomenon has led to a growing body of work on the relationship between participatory cultures and civic and political engagement (e.g., Bennett, Freelon, and Wells 2010; Brough and Shresthova 2012). The concept of participatory culture as one in which media audiences are active and produce their own stories in response to commercial media content has a longer history in the field of media studies—and an even longer historical relevance in Western society. fi For example, the active theater audiences of Elizabethan England were participatory and even performative in their involvement in the theater, cheering or critically commenting on the actors’ performance and using the theater as...

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