Week 2: Participatory Culture 101 & Project Planning
Submitted by Peter Morse on Tue, 15/08/2006 - 21:06.
Week 2: Participatory Culture 101 & Project Planning
Your core readings for this seminar are:
Bonnie A. Nardi, Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht, Luke Swartz, "Why we blog." Communications of the ACM, Volume 47, Number 12 (2004), Pages 41-46. Online (accessed August 2006): http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1040000/1035163/p41-nardi.html?key1=1035...
Steven D. Krause, When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction. Online (accessed Auguest 2006): http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/9.1/praxis/krause/
Anita Blanchard, "Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project." Into the Blogosphere. Ed. Smiljana Antonijevic, Laura Gurak, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman, 2004. Online (accessed August 2006): http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html
Suggested Extra Reading
Henry Jenkins, "Interactive Audiences?: The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans" in Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book, (London: British Film Institute, 2002), pp. 157-170.
J.D. Lasica, "Darknet mini-book: Introduction", "'Darknet' foreword" (by Howard Rhinegold), and "The teenage filmmakers" in Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation. John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
The article by Henry Jenkins looks at interactivity and audience agency, giving a sense of where culture has been in terms of participation and ownership, and then looks to how culture is shifting facilitated, in part, by digital communication. Anita Blanchard's piece takes a more focused (and more sociological) look at a specfic blog and explores how a community can (or can't) emerge from their engagement around one blog. Finally, the excerpts from J.D. Lasica's Darknet look at what immediate changes and battles are happening in the Western cultural context due to immediate challenges made by digital communication and interaction tools.
While this seminar is meant as a general overview, you might want to keep these questions in mind when doing you reading:
[1] Is participatory culture a brand new idea, or does is have historical precedents?
[2] How are the terms 'ownership', 'community' and 'culture' actually used in these readings (and are these stable terms, or do they mean something different for each author)?
[3] How open and accessible is cultural production in the twenty-first century? What are the trends, and where do you think things are headed?
