Participatory culture

I often feel like a cultural black hole. Engulfing and consuming large quantities of culture, music, movies, books, and yet never producing any of it myself. Does it just get wasted inside? Well, I talk about it :-)

The Internet is promoting a new kind of culture that is more inclusive. To me, YouTube is the most glaring example: everyday people producing audio/video material, mostly out of their own time and effort, that addresses any topic that concerns them. Sometimes using it for commercial self-promotion, and that's part of the point too. Sure enough, that topic turns out to also interest other people who can comment on the work. This self-organized audience responds to the author with positive or negative comments, and ensues a thread of discussion that can take many paths, that the author herself follows and responds to. The concept of "Video Response" achieves the aim of elevating the audience to the level of the author, becoming peers exchanging cultural artifacts. Ratings and general audience comments quickly establish the successful authors from the lame ones.

Of course, YouTube is a small fraction of the culture exchanged on the Internet. Blogs are the famed citizen answer to journalism, MySpace and many other music-oriented social sites enable musical exchange and promotion, Wikipedia runs for the human encyclopedia, and so on it goes for all other aspects of the media, and all professions besides.

That new, participatory culture is not, and should not be perceived as, a threat to the cultural-producing establishment. It is a powerful component that has just emerged in the world of media! It is finding its place as a better way to interact with the establishment, rather than supplanting it. Already, movie, music and book database sites facilitate the retrieval of indexical information far better that any other means available to the public. Further, with traditional media companies and institutions marketing their productions online, they acknowledge the fact that the Internet exists as a new medium that must be reckoned with. Their early aggressive attempts to forcibly mold it having failed, they are now learning to live with it, maybe even embrace it - they are human, if partly, too.

I could go on a diatribe about how traditional media have been used as a mass manipulation device in our recent history, up until today. But that's another story, vividly told by Adam Curtis in his 2002 documentary "The Century of the Self". You may preview it online at Internet Archive or Google Video :-)

The Internet may hold a promise that we, the people, will rise above manipulation and participate in the media as we truly are.