Participatory Culture Notes- Exec Summary

Notes on Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture

This is at least the third time I have read this.

Participatory Culture

For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one:
1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).   – Jenkins definition

This is where I first became interested in taking my research beyond the classroom.  I got caught on #4 – are schools a participatory culture in terms of students thinking their contributions matter?  Not in my school in which there are 2 prevailing views based on the notion that high school is a necessary evil.  The first view is what I am learning now is unimportant, it is all unimportant until I get into college.  Therefore I will do what is necessary to pass my classes with the appropriate grade to get into the college of my choice.  The second is that high school is a waste of time but it is where I see my friends, and I have nothing better to do.  Neither of these attitudes believe that their contribution or work matters.  But some of theses same students, in both groups, do create and learn in an informal manner while online.

Forms of participatory culture include:

4.    Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging) – Jenkins

I numbered them so I can respond.  The focus of my research is on the last three.  This is where you see mentoring, synthesizing new information, mastering new skills so that they become second nature, responding to criticism by analyzing the criticism in terms of the work, etc.  All information behaviors that have not been thoroughly studied in the LIS field, but consistent with everyday life information behaviors research.

Jenkins elaborates that there is growing body of scholarship that investigates the benefits:

o    Peer to peer learning
o    Changed attitude toward intellectual property
o    Diversification of cultural expression
o    Development of skills valued in the modern workplace
o    More empowered conception of citizenship

He also uses the term “hidden curriculum” which I like.  There are whole hosts of hidden curricula both on and off campus, in geographic locations, and virtual communities.  Shouldn’t we be working to expose the hidden curricula – to capitalize on it – to appropriate it – and to figure out how to appropriate it without killing it by making it “uncool” (which education is particularly successful at).

Concerns as outlined in the paper:

Participation Gap –unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills and knowledge
Transparency Problem – challenges in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world
Ethics challenge – breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization

This paper is almost 3 years old so it sort of seems like these concerns are obvious, but we still aren’t really talking about them in a way that allows society as a whole to coherently address them.  We still seem to operate from a place of fear and misunderstanding*.  In some ways it is as seemingly innocuous as the digital immigrant digital native construct (which isn’t innocuous because it allows teachers, parents, admin to shrug and say “they already know” when quite possibly that is not true, Jenkins point of course), in others it is much more obviously problematic.

New literacies built on social skills developed through collaboration and networking
Skills build on foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills.

Definition of literacy – the ability to read; understanding of something (ex. computer literacy) (from wiktionary)
Look it is way more complicated than that.  Literacy is a continuum, and at different times, within different disciplines, and using different skills one may find them selves at different places on the continuum.  Society wants to simplify literacy so they can wrap their arms around it, gauge it, test for it, etc. Teachers, educators fracture literacy – fighting over pieces of the pie – basic literacy (reading/writing/mathematical functions), computer literacy (which admittedly is now outdated) adolescent literacy, academic literacy, information literacy, media literacy, financial literacy, etc.   I think this fracturing is problematic – we need to return to a more holistic vision – like literacy – the ability to get by in the world – and think about the pie pieces in terms of skills and behaviors.  Skills and behaviors can be taught and shared, literacy is a state of being.

The white paper identifies 11 skills:

• Play is the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving.
• Performance is the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.
• Simulation is the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.
• Appropriation is the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Cut-Ups
• Practice appropriation by creating cut-ups, either online or offline.
• Multitasking the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition is the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.
• Collective Intelligence is the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.
• Judgment is the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.
• Transmedia Navigation is the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.
• Networking is the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.
• Negotiation is the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

And a recently added 12th

Visualization is the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends.

• I know I once read a reasonable response to this – including mentioning that the news articles sensationalized it as if the research was done, not just a call for research – but I can’t it now.  ::sigh::