Audience engagement is not only crucial for increasing attendance and enhancing influence. To engage means showing respect for different positions, considering various points of view, informing with responsibility and trust, infecting with enthusiasm, and sharing meanings. Today it is seen as a strategy for the development of the media itself. Today’s media seeks a deeper understanding of its mission by creating opportunities for the community to participate in decision-making and finding common ground with critical communities (academics, ethnic communities, or subcultural groups). Such a culture is important for the development of free science and technology that positively affects people’s lives.
The participatory culture model requires independent experts to deepen their competence. They must understand the mechanisms of communication and democracy and be able to work in a multicultural context. Implementing participatory projects implies open, dynamic planning – a willingness to encounter unforeseen factors. Media must be ready to flexibly rearrange during the course of the project and for possible failures. Involvement strategies imply restructuring management models, poorly aligned with vertically integrated structures where one person makes all decisions (Kaushik, 2020). Engagement does not require unanimity but only a respectful partnership to set and solve specific tasks. Therefore, participatory culture offers models of managing processes, not people.
Participatory media refers to the process of writing in which ordinary people, not professional journalists, participate. They collect and publish on the Internet and, less frequently, in the print media, news that concerns them deeply and that they most often have firsthand knowledge of. Such journalism is more associated with blogging, but news sites have become popular now. Previously, media companies created news and owned the channels for its distribution. However, now anyone can add his or her own news and post photos or videos of events. Blogging actively complements journalism and helps it find these or those topics from time to time. On the contrary, it criticizes journalism, pointing it to deficiencies in materials. However, the information published on blogs is characterized by a high degree of timeliness but often does not meet the requirements of professional journalistic ethics.
Several geographic, historical, and political factors contributed to the formation of the media system in the United States. The economic and political development of the United States was initially based on regions – individual states and territories. The formation of the press was also based on the regional principle. This donated to the fact that the United States had no national publications until the second half of the last century. However, the regional press was actively developing for many decades. Among the important trends in the local media in the United States is the decline in the number of independent publications. They are becoming part of large corporations, newspaper chains, and, consequently, competition is weakening. The components of commercial broadcasting are national networks and independent stations. Along with the three national whales of the broadcasting business, several other companies in the United States today can compete with them (Fox News, CNN).
In 1988, a culture of participation began to emerge, proposing a new method of covering the election campaign. The media were to be based on a proactive rather than reactive approach and engage readers as partners in election coverage. Dan Gillmor, one of the most famous theorists of citizen journalism, wrote about the process (Salaverría, 2019). He said that what emerges is a situation where people, formerly called the audience, become participants in information production. Thus, today’s reader (viewer, listener) can influence the form of the news and even produce it himself. Gillmor believed that the term audience itself was already obsolete, and the old type of media should be abandoned altogether.
The advent of the personal computer was one of the factors behind the emergence of participatory culture. The further development of new technologies and the creation of the cell phone further accelerated this process. Mass access to the Internet thus allowed people to become first participants in the discussion and then creators of new content (Hirst, 2018). At the same time, the fact that freedom of speech is the most important value in the United States has influenced this type of culture to become dominant. However, it is evident that there are many countries where broadcast culture dominates. Nevertheless, it can not be concluded that this culture is evil, especially since there are similarities between the two types analyzed: the timely publication of information, its objectivity, and fact-checking.
The affluence of the population and the democracy of the government determine how many people can become creators, and it is the number of independent creators that determines the establishment of participatory culture. The combination of digital technologies has made it possible to distribute media content in real time at a reasonable cost. These technologies have also dealt a major blow to paid distribution (Zhou, 2017). It has been the backbone of the media business for more than three centuries.
Henry Jenkins, an American professor, media theorist, cultural theorist, and fan of contemporary culture, has managed to shake the skeptical attitude toward the possibilities of media theory. The philosopher convinces readers of the need to abandon stereotypes about ancient television culture (Wang, 2018). He believes that participatory culture recycles media consumption experience into a new product that creates a new culture and sustains the old one (Wang, 2018). Decades of consumption of popular culture have not only altered the cultural landscape of generations. They have made new consumers more demanding of movies, TV shows, and games. The technique of access to culture has changed everywhere, providing users with new opportunities. In his work, Jenkins clearly described the vector of media development, which it still adheres to today.
Jenkins talked about how with the development of Internet technology and with the emergence of human blogging in the 2000s, a completely unbelievable and unprecedented cultural experience is emerging. Everyone can become an author, something previously unimaginable. All the writing techniques and techniques of producing cultural meanings were, reserved for elites in the past. However, in the 21st century, this elitism is going away (Park and Han, 2019). Very relevant remains the point of view that now all people are contributing to filling the digital environment with various meanings. Accordingly, each of these meanings has its own viewer, reader, and perceiving subject.
A culture of participation is a certain ideal construction, the spread of which is desirable in any social, cultural, economic, and even political sphere. Participation is realized not only in the online space but also offline. Moreover, a desirable civic, collective practice defines the way people arrange events. For example, crowdfunding support is widely used in various initiatives to produce multiple kinds of objects in the sphere of new technologies. From the point of view of culture, this kind of concept can be taken up by the museum sphere. It is essential to create prerequisites to create something new for people who come to the event. Therefore, their experience of visiting a particular space becomes more intense. Scientific inventions also need to be evaluated and discussed by many people before the results can be applied to people’s current lives. This is only possible if content consumers have the opportunity to read critiques and publish their own opinions in response to published scientific discoveries.
By coming together, people from different organizations and disciplines can find better and more innovative solutions. An example would be text in a programming language that another person can use for free. Such a code allows the ready-made, practical solutions of thousands of experts worldwide to be integrated into new products: accessible programs, practical new applications, and bug-free websites. Moreover, open medical data is changing the patient-doctor relationship. Access to information about the course of the disease allows the patient to share his or her observations with the treating physician more effectively.
Thus, participatory culture helps to better articulate the real needs and concerns that people have and use this information to create new types of content. The culture of collaboration changes the passive role of the consumer into that of the actor, which is relevant not only for online spaces and local communities. Monopolies and restricted access to printing and distribution technologies were the backbones of the media economy in the twentieth century. With the advent of the digital culture came an increase in the influence of independent media and ordinary people creating content with handheld devices. The continued development of this type of culture will determine how transparent the publication of news in technology, science, and politics will be.
Reference List
Kaushik, P. (2020). The pros and cons of vertical integration. Web.
Hirst, K. K. (2018). Understanding mass media and mass communication. Web.
Park, H. H. and Han, H. W. (2019) ‘Participatory culture of crowdfunding in Korea’, Asia Life Sciences, 3, pp. 1179-1189.
Salaverría, R. (2019) ‘Digital journalism: 25 years of research. Review article. Profesional de la Informacion, 28(1), pp. 1-26.
Wang, L. (2018) ‘Book review: Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito and Danah Boyd, participatory culture in a networked Era’, Global Media and China, 3(1), pp. 69–72.
Zhou, J. (2017). Distribution 101: the differences between owned, earned, and paid distribution. Web.