
Our Free Participatory, Online Culture
With the emergence of New Media interacting and engaging with modern-day society, it grows the more people use it. It has now created new modernised participatory cultures in which almost all of us take part in. The Internet and video games are the biggest facilitators contributing new forms of interactivity and narrative to the industry.
Participatory Cultures
Forms of Participatory Culture include:
- Affiliations — Online communities are centred around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, game clans and so on. Affiliations include memberships of both an informal and formal nature. Social networking, however, is regarded a key role in this as affiliations are such a core aspect of participatory culture, that web applications often necessitate a social experience.
- Expressions — Producing new and creative forms of media, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines and mash-ups.
- Collaborative Problem Solving — Formally or informally working together in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge. Such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming and spoiling.
- Circulations — Shaping the flow of media such as podcasting, blogging/vlogging. This has become an established practise for creating user-generated content.
“A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created)”. — Boyd, Jenkins & Ito, 2015
Scholar Henry Jenkins describes how educators might fuel civic engagement by tapping the skills their students build in interest-driven online communities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPm-c1wRsQ
Web 2.0
One could state that Web 2.0 is a universe of its own and has grown into a large network that is becoming increasingly popular by day, connecting many more devices that didn’t exist in the past:
- Smartphones
- IOTs
- Mobile devices
- TV’s
- Tablets
Web 1.0 was used prior to Web 2.0. The only difference between them is the incorporation of interactivity. Web 1.0 consumers used the internet for basic information with little user experience. Web 2.0 on the other hand directly encourages the user to engage with the content they’re viewing, whatever that may be. The various web applications available to name a few are Youtube, Reddit and WordPress. Applications like these are the ones that make the most of a specific platform and they get better the more people use them. The developers behind such applications benefit just as greatly as the user who experiences them themselves. They are constantly delivering and updating software consistently to enhance the user’s experience.
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE POWERS THE INTERNET!
The web, just like the Universe, is vast and absolutely enormous. The possibilities are virtually endless and is continuously growing. ‘The Internet Map’, which is just visually incredible I might just add!, maps every website on the web on a single page as its own virtual universe, with space-like graphics. Each circle represents a website and based upon their size it shows you how popular the website is by the amount of visits it gets. Facebook, Google and Youtube are all the big ones but as you zoom in more and more into this ‘universe’ space or web, smaller sites start to appear. This is an interesting user experience, it just shows you how enormous the web actually is.
Here is what it looks like:


As you can see from the two pictures above (and you can try it out for yourself here), when having clicked on a site’s representation of a planet a window pops over it with a brief description of what the site is and its global ranking, as well as its country’s ranking.
The internet is open which means its free for everyone to use. It may not be as openly accessible in some countries than it is for yours, however this means that using the technologies of Web 2.0, we (the people) have the power to contribute and participate in this cyber space with no boundaries. Just like the universe, the possibilities are endless.
Wiki is a database (or a website depending on how you look at it) that was developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content. Like Github, it allows users to collaborate and modify content plus including the ability to expand its structure and/or delete content.
A Wiki is a large database for creating, browsing and searching through information. Wikipedia, Wikimedia or any of the other Wikis alike all fall under a content management system (CMS) called Wiki. It’s not the same CMS as WordPress because no one owns or holds any right to a Wiki. Wikis have a unique way of structuring information too. For example a Wiki page can be created from multiple authors. Wikipedia invites any user to edit a page or create a new one in the most simplistic way possible in terms of UI & UX.
This is what the Wiki organisation offers. All the information you see from this organisation is written by people like you and I. It is free, it is open and it is powerful! (www.wikimedia.org):

‘Creative Commons Licenses’ give way to a more flexible management of exclusive rights offered by copyright protection. This allows the creators of the content to choose the various kinds of protections and freedom that they wish to apply to their work.
- Attributions — Others can copy, distribute, display, perfume and remix your work if they credit your name as requested by you.
- No Derivative Work — Others can only copy, distribute, display or perform verbatim copies of your work.
- Share Alike — Others can distribute your work only under a license identical to the one you have chosen for your work.
- Non-Commercial — Others can copy, distribute, display, perform or remix your work but for non-commercial purpose only.
These terms combined will allow others to use your work whilst still protecting your property. This has created a free, shared internet culture. In other words, what’s mine is yours, only if you comply to the terms of the licensing agreements that I have chosen.
WordPress has been built using open source software. Just like:
- Firefox web browser
- Git
- VLC Media Player
The open source softwares that I personally have used so far are:
- PHP
- MySQL (Databases)
- Processing
- Adobe Brackets (to develop my code)
- FileZilla (to upload my code files to a server).
Here are some other FREE, open source, User Generated Content websites that you might find interesting:
- gutenburg.org — FREE e-books
- archive.org — digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form
- en.wikibooks.org — Free books such as recipes
- data.gov.uk
- okfn.org — Open data content
Open source Hardware:
Social:
