Introduction: Between Blog and Book

My last book for Polity Press – Participatory Culture in a Networked Era – was an extended conversation with two of my best thinking partners, danah boyd and Mizuko Ito. Over the course of the book, we tackled some shared concerns:

In what sense do we believe contemporary culture is more participatory than what came before?
Who gets to participate and who is left outside this collective exchange?
Why is participation a good thing?
How have ideas about the value of participation and connection impacted the way learning takes place inside and outside the classroom?
How have new business models and technological infrastructures emerged which encourage and profit from social media engagements and grassroots media-making?
What does activism look like in a world where the ability to create and circulate media at a grassroots level is widely distributed?
What roles should intellectuals play in promoting greater participation in culture, education, and politics?

Participatory Culture: Interviews is intended as a companion to that other book, picking up on many of these same issues, but broadening the conversation to incorporate more diverse thinkers whose work has informed my own perspective. You do not need to have read the other book to find something of value here, but it would certainly help to provide the larger contexts in which these exchanges took place. In both cases, the structures of the book are intended to suggest that dialogic writing – that is, exchanges between multiple thinkers – is a more appropriate way to align form with content here, to create a mode of academic writing that is consistent with the values of a more participatory culture.

Since its launch in June 2006, I have made more than 2,000 posts to my blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan (henryjenkins.org), including interviews, dialogs, and conversations with more than 350 other scholars, journalists, educators, artists, activists, and public intellectuals. This book contains a baker’s dozen of my favorite interviews with people whom I regard as important mentors and thinking partners. (Narrowing down to this small number of selections was painful, so I am putting a list of other related interviews at the end of each section of my introductions so you can dig deeper into these issues.)

While I began this blog as a means of promoting my own ideas and activities, it has more and more become a platform for prompting and hosting exchanges that advance the field of cultural and media studies. I am interested in how to create dialogic and collaborative spaces within academia, including spaces where academics can engage with and learn from conversations with practitioners of all kinds, where academic exchanges may bridge disciplinary and national borders, and where we might hammer out disagreements as opposed to lobbing peer-reviewed journal articles over the wall every few years.

Amongst those many interviews, there are many possible books I could have curated – some more focused than this one around the creative industries and their output, say, or around the study of fandom, or around comics and other popular media, or around transmedia storytelling practices, all important dimensions of my scholarship and teaching. Building on the earlier book, I have structured this collection around three core concepts – participatory culture, participatory learning, and participatory politics.

We will explore each of these concepts in more depth as the book progresses, but, for now, we can define these concepts in the following way:

Participatory culture refers to a culture in which large numbers of people from all walks of life have the capacity to produce and share media with each other, often responding critically to the products of mass media, and often circulating what they create fluidly across a range of different niche publics.

Participatory learning refers to pedagogical approaches that are modeled after the logics and practices of participatory culture, including those which incorporate games, social media, fandom, and mobile technologies into the learning process. Mimi Ito describes such practices as connected learning and, while there are some differences between the two, I find her model a compelling way to address opportunities and risks, and, in particular, inequalities of access to opportunities to learn through participation.

Participatory politics refers to what happens when a generation of young people who have grown up with more opportunities to meaningfully participate in culture turns its voices to struggles for social justice and political change. Participatory politics may include engagement with electoral and institutional politics, but it may also be directed towards shaping the world through informing public opinion or directing pressure against corporate interests.

Taken together, these interviews trace the ways our collective understanding of these concepts evolved over time. Moreover, I hope that reading these assembled interviews will allow us to reflect upon knowledge-production as a conversation amongst people who learn by listening to and building upon each other’s insights. To further aid our understanding, I asked each interview subject to share short reflections on how their own thinking has changed as they have dug deeper into their scholarship or simply responded to changing times. These statements, almost without exception, speak to a sense of crisis as our contemporary culture has failed to achieve the democratic potentials we once anticipated as a consequence of the participatory turn.

Long before I launched my own blog, I was interested in the ways that blogging might illustrate the nature of participatory culture. Writing about blogging in Technology Review (2001), I argued that we might trace two distinct but interlocking accounts of media history:

first, the history of commercial media production and circulation, including the history of the publishing, advertising, journalism, and entertainment industries;
second, the history of grassroots media production and circulation – the history of toy printing presses and zines, Super 8 movies, and fan fiction.

Such an approach does not see participatory culture springing full-born over night with the widespread embrace of digital and mobile technologies. Rather, digital culture provides resources that respond to several hundred years of struggle by grassroots communities wishing for better means of shaping the national agenda and sharing their stories with each other. We might, for example, point to the ways that the counterculture of the 1960s sought to route around mass media through the use of hyperlocal radio stations, alternative newspapers and newsletters, underground comics, concerts, posters, and street theatre to cite just a few examples. It is striking that many counterculture leaders were among the first to embrace the concept of the virtual community, incorporating digital tools and practices in their long-evolving repertoire.

Understanding the newer forms of participatory culture as part of an older struggle between top-down and bottom-up forms of power is helpful in allowing us to recognize that these struggles are apt to persist for many decades to come. The rise of the digital did not resolve these conflicts but rather shifted the grounds upon which these struggles occurred, allowing for new relationships between the forces struggling over access to communication resources. The outcomes of these struggles are not predictable – other than that no one side is going to finish the other off any time soon. So, at the moment, the situation feels dark, because some of the opportunities we once had to share our ideas are shut down, some are deploying grassroots media to demonize and silence other communities, and those in power have learned new ways to deploy that power in pursuit of their own interests. Yet there have been moments of hope and despair before, and the key thing is to continue to struggle toward a more participatory culture, one which more fully realizes our ideals, and not to give over to narratives of inevitability in which we are either overwhelmed or liberated by technological change.

Understood in these terms, blogging falls at the intersection where grassroots media producers curate and respond to content generated by mass media producers – reframing, say, pieces produced by professional journalists for their own community, often addressing groups that have been underserved by mass media. Today, social media plays many of these same functions, with research showing most young people gain information about current events primarily through content shared by their friends via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other such platforms. Some describe such practices as citizen journalism, a term which troubles me for several reasons. First, I think it is important for professional journalists to recognize that they are also citizens and that their mission takes place in a larger civic context. But, second, what I do with my blog is not intended to be journalism per se, but rather represents an extension of my professorial role, as a means of speaking from within my discipline to a larger informed public which is also confronting and trying to think through a moment of rapid media change.

When I first wrote about blogging in 2001, it was in the wake of the dot.com bust, and the Web 2.0 companies had not yet found ways to profit from our participation: “We’re in a lull between waves of commercialization in digital media, and bloggers are seizing the moment, potentially increasing cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation.” Even as I was writing, the survivors of the dot.com crash were regrouping, reformulating lessons learned, and developing new business models that would become known as Web 2.0. These business models spoke of grassroots creativity and collective intelligence – two cornerstones of participatory culture – as what would drive customers to embrace social media platforms that would allow them to share content with each other online. These companies would provide the platform both as a way to drive eyeballs to advertisements and as a means of mining data on their user bases. My critiques of these models surface in both Participatory Culture in a Networked Era and Spreadable Media. But, in 2001, in a moment of optimism, I saw a dramatic increase in our opportunities to produce and circulate media. If we do not yet live in a fully participatory culture, we clearly live in a more participatory culture as more people – individually and collectively – have embraced those potentials. If my excitement about blogging may now seem quaint, it is because blogging has, to some degree, run its cycle: blogging has become a normative practice, no longer a point of innovation within our rapidly changing society. Academic blogging still represents an important outlet for public intellectuals, but social media took over some of the everyday functions of blogs, and the technological infrastructure supporting the blog community was abandoned by companies seeking the next new thing. Today, podcasting is where the excitement is – a site of rapid growth and widespread experimentation, a space where grassroots cultural production exists alongside a new growth of commercial media. I am also experimenting in this space through my own podcast, done in conjunction with Colin Maclay, the Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab: How Do You Like It So Far?

In another early piece (2002), I contrasted the logics of blogging and culture jamming. The culture jammer seeks to disrupt the flow of mass media, the blogger seeks to redirect it (calling attention often to information that might otherwise be lost or ignored). I wrote, “In some cases, bloggers actively deconstruct pernicious claims or poke fun at other sites; in others, they form temporary tactical alliances with other bloggers or with media producers to insure that important messages get more widely circulated. These bloggers have become important grassroots intermediaries – facilitators, not jammers, of the signal flow.” Here, I was thinking about blogging in its earliest forms – as the gathering together and annotation of meaningful links. Yet, blogging, over time, became more than that – a space of reflection and conversation which sought to surface and share perspectives that were often left out of professional media content.

As such, blogging offered enormous opportunities for public intellectuals to translate ideas that were often locked away within academia into language and formats that might allow them to travel more broadly across the culture. I often remind my students that my job title, “Professor,” contains within it the ethical obligation to profess – that is, to make information available to anyone who wants to know, to spread ideas more widely across the culture, and to create a context where different thinkers might come together to share knowledge with each other. This is very much how I understand the work of my blog. By virtue of my status within the academic world, I have the capacity to direct attention, to amplify voices.

I also have the opportunity to draw other scholars into conversation with a larger public of readers, which, in the case of my blog, includes fans, educators, industry leaders, creative artists, activists, students, and so forth. I have been experimenting with different ways for academic writing to be more dialogic. My blog sometimes includes guest posts, most often from my students, allowing younger and emerging scholars to share their perspectives. I have organized some large-scale conversations, especially as they relate to the field of fandom studies, where dozens of scholars pair off together, writing back and forth to explore the intersections between their work. I have even exported this model to academic journals in the case of a conversation about participation which I co-hosted with Nick Couldry in the International Journal of Communication. I have done one-on-one exchanges myself with important scholars whose work intersects my own, using this format to work through disagreements or clarify and contrast core concepts from our work. And finally, as is illustrated here, I conduct interviews in which I frame a set of questions that I think will be of interest to my readers and wait for the research subjects to respond by email.

When I first discovered blogging, I was fascinated with the speed of communication – watching people live-blog events and instantly spread information out to their public. I described bloggers as the “minute men of the digital revolution,” because of their ability to rapidly respond to shifting conditions on the ground and, in effect, spread the alarm to every Middlesex village and farm. As I wrote, “Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the web, they snowboard it.” As an academic who writes about contemporary culture, I am often frustrated by the slow pace of academic publishing, where it can take years for what I write to appear in print, and as my words are waiting, locked down, unable to be updated, while I watch the world changing around us in ways that may at any moment render these arguments obsolete. I also see people locked into their positions, unable to respond to challenges in real time, unable to think through points of differences and consider alternative perspectives. I see the scholarly blog as trying to find a balance between the immediacy of live blogging and the sluggishness of academic publishing, hoping to produce posts that are timely and reflective, which speak to the current moment by linking it to larger historical and theoretical debates.

Because of my interest in the temporality of blogging, you may well ask why I am now collecting some of these blog pieces in a book, or, for that matter, why I am encouraging you to revisit interviews that were conducted, in some cases, 15 years ago. The book has what the blog lacks – a sense of permanence – and, through permanence, we can communicate something else: that some ideas have lasting value, are worth returning to because they contain insights that may withstand the test of time – or, conversely, because they provide a time capsule that future generations may use to better understand how we responded to a period of rapid change. While I tend to read my work in tactical terms – what I write reflects what I can know and say at a particular moment in time – I also think we secure ground over time. Our ideas are tested against new developments and contested through academic dialogue, but, over time, we deepen our understanding of the phenomenon we are trying to describe. Consequently, I have chosen these particular interviews because these people and these exchanges taught me something important, something that has stayed with me.

As we read these interviews in a printed book, we shift temporalities – from the immediate to the long term – but I want to remind you that none of us saw ourselves as speaking beyond the current moment. I was shocked when I first heard that people were assigning my blog posts in classes or citing them in academic articles, because I had seen them as drafts where I think out loud and solicit feedback from others working on the same topics. I did not see these blog pieces as “finished” – not that anything we write is ever finished. Rather, these posts were open and fluid (reflecting the fact that blog technology allows me to go back and correct or change texts after they have been released to the reading public, again creating a very different dynamic than authors’ experience working in print).

This is why blogging feels so liberating – words are not precious, ideas are not contained, thoughts are not locked down, and one’s immediate reflections, for better or worse, can go out to the world and we do not need anyone’s permission or approval. But this means we make a category confusion when we bring print-based assumptions to bear upon blog content. These are ideas in a rawer form than writing which has gone through the editorial or peer-review process, receiving active and collaborative revision before going out to the world.

I am trying to replicate my voice as a blogger here – as if I could speak directly to you, as if there was no gap between reading and writing – though I know how many other people will work upon and pass along these words before they reach your eyes. No matter how much I tell you to read these interviews as if they were posted on a blog, the fact that you are reading them in a book will change the mental frame you bring to them. I can only hope that they will also inspire further conversation and reflection, that you will pass some of these thoughts along through your social media, that you may share them with students and colleagues, or – even better – that you will act upon them to change the world. What happens next, like this book itself, is in your hands.

1
Introduction to Participatory Culture

Early in my blog’s history (Nov. 5, 2006), I shared an outtake from a report I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, in which I identified eight defining characteristics of the current media landscape. My goal was to move the discussion of digital media and learning away from an inventory of tools (since the platforms and devices were then, as now, rapidly evolving). Rather, I wanted to discuss larger patterns within the culture that shaped which technologies would be taken up, who could or could not access them, what purposes they might serve, and what status they might hold.

I argued that the contemporary media landscape is:

Innovative: “New media are created, dispersed, adopted, adapted, and absorbed into the culture at dramatic rates … Each new technology spawns a range of different uses and inspires a diversity of aesthetic responses as it gets taken up and deployed by different communities of users.”
Convergent: “Every major idea, image, sound, story, brand, and relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible range of media channels.… Convergence is being shaped top-down by the decisions being made by massive media conglomerates who have controlling interests across all possible media systems and who enjoy the power to insure that their content circulates globally.… At the same time, convergence is being shaped bottom-up by the participatory impulses of consumers, who want the ability to control and shape the flow of media in their lives; they want the media they want when they want it and where they want it.… Moreover, these consumers are taking advantage of the new media technologies to respond to, remix and repurpose existing media content; they use the web to talk back to media producers or tell their own stories about fictional characters.”
Everyday: “The technologization of the American home has been an ongoing process across the 20th century.… Media technologies are fully integrated into our everyday social interactions.”
Appropriative: “New technologies make it easy for people to sample and repurpose media images. We can now quote and recontextualize recorded sounds and images (both still and moving) almost as easily as we can quote and recontextualize words. Increasingly, our culture communicates through snippets of borrowed media content.… We want to become a part of the media experiences which matter to us; we want to create and share our own media with others.”
Networked: “Media technologies are interconnected so that messages flow easily from one place to another and from one person to another. Communication occurs at a variety of levels – from intimate and personal to public and large-scale.”
Global: “Media content flows fluidly across national borders; people deploy the new communication networks to interact with others around the world. The global scale of this new media landscape changes the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world.”
Generational: “Recent research suggests that young people and adults live in fundamentally different media environments, using communications technologies in different ways and forming contradictory interpretations of their experiences.”
Unequal: “In so far as participation … represents a new source of power, wealth, and knowledge, it also represents a new site of privilege and inequality.… Expanding access to cyberspace has the potential of empowering new segments of the public to become fuller participants in cultural and civic life, yet we can be concerned by the ability of these electronic technologies to render invisible anyone who is not able to participate.”

Taken together, these traits constitute the preconditions for what I call participatory culture. I have defined participatory culture in various ways through the years – for example, describing it as the application of the practices and logics of folk culture to raw materials provided by mass culture (2006), or discussing it in terms of an environment where all are allowed to contribute their own expressive work and receive feedback from those who are more experienced (2009), or analyzing it in terms of a space where multiple voices are heard and are able to have some impact on the decisions that impact their own lives (2016). The first definition speaks to issues of culture; the second, education; and the third, politics and civics. At various points, each of these definitions has been central to my work as I addressed different groups – fans, educators, activists, policy makers. The progression of interviews in this book reflects these different frames for thinking about why participation matters. I am bracketing in this collection a fourth important focus of my work – the ways in which networked culture blurs the lines between consumer and producer, forcing media companies to forge different relationships with their fans. The interviews included in this section speak to broad attributes of participatory culture – in particular, changing conceptions of authorship, creativity, and cosmopolitanism.

I begin the book with the Italian activist/artistic collective, the Wu Ming Foundation, because their story speaks so powerfully to the ways that transformations in the media landscape are resulting in shifts in the status of authors and their relationship with their public. The Wu Ming Foundation, from the start, has refused to accept traditional boundaries between high and low art, between creators and consumers, between individual artists and their collaborators, and between art and politics. My work on participatory culture resonated with them because they were already exploring new forms of performance and storytelling which opened up space for their readers and fans to actively contribute to their creative process, and because they were using their artistic pranks to identify points of vulnerability in the way mass media and professional journalism were currently operating. They were creating works that were designed to be appropriated, that actively encouraged people to take up and extend their artistic projects in new directions. They often did so by masking their own identities so that others would have greater freedom to become the authors of the culture around them. Interestingly, as we are writing, we are seeing the impact of the global appropriation and remixing of their work in the form of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Wu Ming’s novel, Q, deals with the exploits of a spy for the Roman Catholic church during the sixteenth century, but has been widely read as an allegory for contemporary European politics. Q – a transnational best-seller – has been published in 18 languages. The QAnon conspiracy theory refers to a series of revelations from someone who claims to be part of the American deep state and who goes by the name Q. This Q has constructed a narrative that makes Donald Trump the protagonist in a struggle against, among other things, human trafficking, in which Hollywood and the Democratic party are implicated. Here, we see Wu Ming’s politics turned upside down, but we also see an extension of some of the tactics by which they had sought to disrupt the communication sector a decade or more earlier.

David Gauntlett and I share a commitment to help promote grassroots creativity, which is central to my conception of participatory culture. But we also share some important disagreements. The one which surfaced during my exchange with him was the difference between his focus on creativity as understood through the frames of folk culture and maker culture, and my own interest in the ways fan communities remix and remake raw materials drawn from mass culture. This disagreement was clearly an important one for both of us: Gauntlett returns to this moment as the focal point for his reflections on the interview. At stake is what it means to create, what relationship exists between artists and the culture around them, how cultural traditions and shared stories might impact their practices, and what forms of acknowledgment they owe to those who come before. Gauntlett’s work reminds us that the idea of grassroots creativity has a larger history, that it is visible in the ways folk practices – ranging from stitching and weaving to singing and dancing – were passed down from one generation to the next. He is interested in exploring what value people placed on the things they made with their own hands, as opposed to the readymade objects of industrial culture. And he is interested in the ways the digital is enabling new platforms for people to share what they make with each other.

My conversation with Ethan Zuckerman asks whether our use of networked communications technology really fulfills the potentials many of us saw for a more global circulation of ideas. Zuckerman is almost certainly the most cosmopolitan person I know – always a bit jet-lagged because of his brutal travel schedule, connected through his work on Global Voices with bloggers who write knowingly about social and political movements in their countries, helping to develop new tools and practices for connecting people together through his work at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. This interview was shaped by the context of the Arab Spring movement which he was tracking closely. Many in the west had been excited by the ways in which Twitter allowed the perspectives of those resisting – and in some cases overturning – longstanding and repressive governments in the Middle East to be communicated quickly and directly with supporters around the world. Yet, these exchanges resulted in misunderstandings and raised false expectations because they were not grounded in the kinds of ongoing exchanges that might allow us to better understand each other. What he calls “incomplete globalization” reflects the difference between spectacular examples of “global” communication and the “everyday” aspects of participation in a networked culture.

Participatory Culture

Interviews

Copyright page

Introduction: Between Blog and Book

Further Reading

PART I
PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

1
Introduction to Participatory Culture

Further Reading