Social Media and Participatory Culture

Understanding Participatory Culture

Participatory culture is a culture that encourages everyone to come into it and become a part of it. In this culture, individuals are supported for creating and sharing their productions and pass the information along to beginners. The critical characteristic of participatory culture is that it offers low barriers for individuals to express their perspectives and artworks. It also makes individuals feel that their productions are matter.

Participatory culture is one of the core characteristics of social media. It has four forms: affiliations, expressions, collaborative problem-solving, and circulation.

• Affiliation is membership in online communities. The membership usually is displayed as a VIP signature that others can recognize. It also could be generalized to the inner feeling of connectedness to the social media platform.
• Expression is that individuals can produce their creative productions.
• Collaborative problem-solving is a strategy to work together to complete tasks and develop new knowledge.
• Circulation is when you do something to shape the flow of media or join the flow of media such as podcasting or blogging.

Do they sound familiar? Yes, we do them all day.

Affiliation: We definitely are memberships in at least one of the online communities. For instance, if you play games, then each game is your affiliation to each community.

Expression: We publish our creative PS photos, fan fiction writing, and so forth. For example, I have written some fan fiction and published them in the community. Although only a few of people “like” it, I still felt happy.

Collaborative problem-solving: In schools, we did lots of group projects.

Circulation: We tweet and retweet news, valued information, or experience of an event on social media such as Twitter.

In Confronting the Challenge of Participatory Culture : Media Education for 21 Century, Jenkins et al. listed some new skills that novices needed to obtain, even though they had had the ability to read and write for traditional literacy.

Play: the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation : the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multimasking: the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details

Distributed Cognition: the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation: the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discern and respect multiple perspectives, and grasp and follow alternative norms.

Wow. There’s a lot!

Judgment is the most important skill that everyone has to have. The topic of the accumulation of junk information had been repeatedly discussed when we entered into Web 2.0 in which we can actively participate in and act with the Internet. Because online activism, claimed by Hinton and Hjorth, “enables various participative media and allows produsers to express opinions and ideas in the online environment,” more and more resources and information emerge on the Internet. Some of them are fraud, fake, or useless, and we have to have the ability of judgment to know how to filter the valuable and true information and knowledge.

The lack of ability of judgment is also caused by professional journalists. it lacks the transparency of traditional news media. Citizen journalists do not need to follow professional codes of conduct. They are free to write whatever they want, which make readers to have more responsibility on determining the quality of the source. However, professional journalists always sort rumors from facts, evluate them, and synthesize a story from multiple, often-conflicted sources.

Twitter bypasses normal editorial control, potentially leading to incorrect and misleading reports being released which are then left to readers to analyze and evaluate.

Consequently, we have to be able to judge the sources and information that we receive. Parents also should teach their children norms to identify the reliability and credibility of sources.

We are not moving on to the next stage until have acknowledged the lack of participatory culture. Many players have announced some projects or programs about Web 3.0 such as Meta.

Judgement is Critical Thinking

6 days ago, I saw professor Pazurek retweeted a post of MrB. This is a great example that shows how to make judgments.

First, when we saw some things from authorities, the only thing we do is to use the knowledge that we have to speculate it. If you can view it from an alternative perspective, such as a business view, then you should do it after your first view. The essential thing is that you have to think thoroughly.

For example, although the concept of Piaget stage and the concept of gene-environment interaction are in the big idea of developmental psychology, they are still different because Piaget stages focus on the children themselves about their mind and perception development, and gene-environment interaction adds more how an individual actively or passively interact from external factors.

Well, you can also argue this topic from empiricism or sociology.

Second, we have to capsulize our insights from concepts. For this topic, I don’t think that young children are able to make critical thinking because they do not have enough experience and knowledge or can view a single event or topic from various angles.

Third, you can write these down on paper or say them in your mind.

Is this person’s sentence junk? Of course not, because it makes me engage in a “debate” in my mind. For me, this “debate” is my criteria for identifying valuable information.

So, how to decide which information is valuable is an important question for everyone to keep in mind when we go to the next Internet era.

Participatory is Making Engagement

Learning is the process of change.

Sometimes, people resist change. Hence, whether it’s traditional or online learning, they share the same goal of keeping everyone engaged. Let’s review participatory culture.

1. People can easily engage in it because of its low barriers
2. People feel supported for creating and sharing productions with others
3. People can pass their experiences to novices.
4. People believe their contributions matters
5. People feel connected with one another.

Participatory culture provides motivation on individuals’ emotional levels. It offers social connectedness, self-actualization, and self-confidence to every individual.

It also provides goal satisfaction because every individual has a goal to participate in an online community or social media. For example, they want to be seen by others, they want to create something valuable, or they just like to share stuff.

You can see more examples in Henry Jenkins’s video below:

Personal experience

In China, the feelings of an online community are the paramount thing that every internet company has to pay lots of effort to work on. The reason is simply that they want customers to stay on their platforms. I used some of them for special motivations.

Netease Music

Netease Music is a social media for listening to music. As you can see in the picture, it may look like Spotify. The difference is that you can not only listen to music but also join the clan and share it with your members.

For me, I join the clan named “How’s your day”. I share a song every day to represent my daily feelings such as sadness, happiness, or anger. I also post some pictures about the beautiful thinking that I saw today. I can also express my negative feelings by posting some words, and someone sees it, he or she can leave a comment or send a private message to console me. Also, you can be paired with someone who has similar tastes in music with you to listen to music together.

Zhihu

Zhihu is a platform just like quora. The motivation that incentive me to engage in its community is that I like to help others to solve their problems. Hence, after I understood what it was and how it worked, I decided to join the online community to help others in 2017. It sometimes sends me some notification to encourage me to write articles, but I did not do it until I thought that I was able to do it at the end of the year 2018. I love technologies, especially smartphones. After I possessed the knowledge of smartphones and the ability of digital literacy, I finally decided to write some articles about Xiaomi, one of my favorite smartphone companies.

However, with more and more citizen journalists coming in, your contents are difficult to be seen. Hence, more and more writers start to rub traffic with hot hashtags or topics. For example, I choose to publish my article named What features we might expect on the New Phone? one day before the launch event, and publish another article named The advantage and Disadvantage You might Want To Know one day after the launch event.

The result was really good. I earned 30k reviews for each of them. It seems cool, right? I nonetheless want to say that it was really tired because I have to search, evaluate, and integrate information in one day.

Then, I read some books and listened to some podcasts about the change of Zhihu and critiques of Zhihu. I stop writing for three months to think about what I should do next. I looked back on my old articles and I realized that I should focus on the quality of my articles and not produce trash.

Therefore, the participatory culture taught me that you have to stop frequently to introspect what you are doing in the culture and to see whether you are on the right trajectory of your original thoughts.

SSPAI

Thus, I almost quit from ZhiHu and transfer my articles to my computer, but I still write some articles and answer questions that I am interested in. After I precipitated myself and practiced my digital literacy skills for three years on Zhihu. I told myself that it was time to move forward. Then, I applied to be a writer on SSPAI.

SSPAI is a high-quality community that has high-quality content, produsers, and readers. You can read long, high-quality articles about productivity software, special lifestyles, and so forth. To me, SSPAI is a community of writers. I can communicate with other senior authors and editors equally in the WeChat group. Also, I think it is the most open and inclusive community in China because some writers are transgenders. You can read their experiences of being transgender in China, which is difficult to see and know from other social media.

Therefore, SSPAI’s participatory culture is that it respects individuals equally and encourages us to write everything. At the beginning of February, I published my article What are my experiences on using $400 paper? and gained 30k real reviews, 78 comments, and 84 real “likes”. This paper is also posted on the first page of the official app and website. The result was that I have insomnia on that night.

Some Contents that I created (All in Chinese):

• Psychology: Take Time, Don’t Worry
• What are my experiences on using $400 paper?
• MIUI might be the original Harmony OS

Recently, I am deciding to make my personal blog, but for now, please follow my medium page.

See you next time.