Critical Perspectives 10 – 27/11 – Participatory Culture, with Jenny Rintoul

Are you a consumer/audience member? → Passive

Are you a producer/creator? A multiplier/distributor? → active

How does this affect your practice?

It's hard to avoid being in the first category altogether – mobile devices allow us to constantly do all three – producers and consumers simutaneously

Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson's phases:

• Emergence (1985-1993) → Zines, etc – hard copies
• Waking Up to the Web (1994-1998) → Yahoo and Google created*
• Push-Button Publishing (1999-2004) → Social networks take off – ordinary peopl
• Ubiquitous connections (2004-2011) → connected EVERYWHERE - interactivity – non-linear experiences

*Nostalgia for clunky designs – actual experiences, or detatchment from the past?

New Media Poetry: Blind Side of a Secret (2007) Collaboration between four people who never met in person – three different outcomes

Steampunk is a part of participatory culture that seeped into the mainstream

Etsy – the hand-produced is given value, but who decides what is of value?

Crowdsourcing – getting things through the audience

Threadless – score and fund your favourite designs

Kickstarter allows everybody to participate

Participant as documenter and multiplier – sites like YouTube are the afterlife of fleeting moments

More people get access to fleeting things

Marina Rominov's “576 Hours” piece is a reaction against this - “we become participators and practitioners at the same time”

It looks like you are in control of culture, but platforms like YouTube are like landlords – we are the tenants (capitalism)

A blind embrace of technology

“The Truman Show Delusion” can arise from participatory culture – the belief that everything one does is monitored

Foucault's panopticon – the guard can see all the prisoners; after a while prisoners act as if they were were being watched

Sousveillance – we, the “prisoners,” all have phone cameras and other tools – the power is back with us

Who is excluded and marginalized? → A third of the world can't access the internet

Ask yourself: how are you using digital technology? What are the pitfalls? How can you make use of participatory culture in your practice?

• Participate in it
• Critique it
• Respond to it