Jul 27 2008
Week 2: Participatory Culture 101
Your core readings for this seminar are:
[X] Henry Jenkins, "Interactive Audiences?: The ‘Collective Intelligence’ of Media Fans" in Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book, (London: British Film Institute, 2002), pp. 157-170.
[X] Tim O’Reilly. ‘What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, O’Reilly Network, 30 September 2005.
[X] J.D. Lasica, "Darknet mini-book: Introduction", "’Darknet’ foreword" (by Howard Rhinegold), and "The teenage filmmakers" in Darknet: Hollywood’s War against the Digital Generation. John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
The article by Henry Jenkins looks at interactivity and audience agency, giving a sense of where culture has been in terms of participation and ownership, and then looks to how culture is shifting facilitated, in part, by digital communication. Tim O’Reilly’s article famously introduces the idea of ‘Web 2.0’ which has widely been adopted to describe the shift toward online cultures built for and by users. Finally, the excerpts from J.D. Lasica’s Darknet look at what immediate changes and battles are happening in the Western cultural context due to immediate challenges made by digital communication and interaction tools.
While this seminar is meant as a general overview, keep these questions in mind when doing you reading:
[1] Is participatory culture a brand new idea, or does is have historical precedents?
[2] How are the terms ‘ownership’, ‘community’ and ‘culture’ actually used in these readings (and are these stable terms, or do they mean something different for each author)?
[3] How is the shorthand ‘web 2.0’ deployed by O’Reilly and how accurate do you think it is?
[4] How open and accessible is cultural production in the twenty-first century? What are the trends, and where do you think things are headed?
(Remember, after our face to face conversation in the seminar, your thoughts and reflections on the topic should be posted as a comment on this post.)
