critical perspectives
29/10/15 // P A R T I C I P A T O R Y C U L T U R E
13:00
b a s e d o n : H. J E R K I N S , R e t h i n k i n g ' R e t h i n k i n g C o n v e r g e n c e / C u l t u r e'
All of us are media creators, consumers and multipliers. What are you?I found this quote from today's lecture on Participatory Culture to be incredibly true and intriguing. I create media through my artwork, photography, Youtube channel, even by blogging on this blog. I consume it by watching Youtube videos by other creators, reading blogs, online magazines, and by being part of various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. And whenever I enjoy something made by someone else, I share it, multiply it on those platforms.
Jenkins firmly believes that in order to achieve "a better Participatory Culture", which is his main goal, we need to move past our history of conflict and aim for an era of a constructive, mutually respectful dialogue. To do that we constantly have to reflect on our own thoughts and what influences them and build up awareness of hidden constructs of society and capitalism that influence us subliminally.
Participatory Culture itself is heavily influenced by developments in technology and our thrive towards free thought and self-expression. In fact, if you look back on its history it opens up the question of where we will go in the future. According to Delwiche and Jacob Henderson, Participatory Culture can be divided into four phases. I have included a graph to visualize and summarize them. In the lecture we discussed a fifth phase to see where we are now.
Social media in particular has introduced us to a new age of possibilities. It enables collaborations that would have been completely impossible without this kind of instant international communication. An example for this is Thomas Swiss' online collaboration with three different artists from all over the world in his project "Blind Side Of a Secret" (2007). He himself contributed a poem, which was visually presented by each of his collaborators individually.
Motoko Nakamura connected poetry with music and abstract imagery. Nils Mühlenbruch combined Swiss' poem with black, white and red imagery and Yoshi Sodeoka created an interactive interface that allowed the viewer to click on different objects within the frame to unlock parts of the poem.
Personally, I found this collaboration incredibly fascinating, because a) all of it was based on the same poem and turned out so differently and b) the process of collaborating only happened online; none of the participators met in real life. For someone from a generation who has grown up with social media and is so fully integrated into that lifestyle that life without it seems incredibly abstract and unreal I have to admit that this gave me a lot of motivation to approach artists that I would otherwise never get the chance to work with because of physical distance and start a solely online based project.
Another part of the lecture that I found interesting is constructions of value and appraisal as participatory practice. The value of something is less determined by its material value but by what kind of symbolic meaning we attach to it.
It dared me to take a further look into what is behind the context in which we view work and who tells us when something is 'of value'? Why do we listen?
Technology gives us a voice and platform for sharing not only our work but also critique and feedback. We become audience and participants at the same time and live in an illusion of freedom.
Let us take a look on celebrity culture as an example. Because we have more access to their lives through social media, we constantly rate and respond to everything because we feel like we know everything. It enables us ordinary people to get on the same level as those respected individuals or maybe even seems to put us above them and enables us to look down on their actions, make-up, body, fashion, etc. "Fan-culture" has become a trend in which celebrities are thoroughly worshipped and idolized to a point where they almost become untouchable god-like creatures, who's mistakes are excused instantly and all actions glorified.
I thought this especially was interesting and I am considering researching into this particular part of celebrity culture deeper and choose it as topic for my essay, because I can definitely relate to it to some extend and find the practices and psychological background extremely intriguing.
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