Participatory Culture and How I Participate
Participatory culture allows digital users to express themselves in an artistic manner, participate in civic engagement, receive support, and gain informal mentorship (Jenkins, Puroshotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robison, 2009). These users engage due to social connections and belief that their content and contributions matter in some way. Jenkins (2009) describes four forms of participatory culture: circulations, affiliation, expressions, and collaborative problem solving.
The first form is circulations, which is the type of media that is passed around. These can differ. Popular forms that circulate today are vlogs and podcasts. Vlogs are essentially video vlogs, usually posted on platforms like YouTube. Podcasts have also risen in popularity within the past few years. These can vary from books, news, commentaries, and more. Some of my personal podcasts are Code Switch, TED Radio Hour, Hidden Brain, and The H3 Podcast. Other examples that are popular are livestreams, and forums like Reddit.
The second form described is affiliations. Affiliations have to do with participatory behavior online that are memberships, whether they be formal or informal. A personal example I have is that I was originally a member of “The Real Farmington MN Community Page”, a private facebook page intended for members of my hometown to share resources, events, and other questions related to the city and school district. Along with this, I am apart of the facebook group “Farmington Anti-Racist Liberals”. Coming from a small town, many of my community members differ in a political stance than me — this made it easier to make social connections in my hometown, as well as keep other community members accountable for wrongful actions in the community. This has also been a great resource where I have been able to support other like-minded businesses, as well as connect to like-minded people in my community. This was a great resource for information regarding elections with school board members and other city members.
The third form is expressions. Expressions are the release of creative forms, an example of this being memes. This type of participatory culture is probably what I am most familiar with, as well as being the most popular among my middle and high school years. When I was 12 years old, I posted a meme on the social media platform iFunny, and was featured. I don’t even think I was old enough to have an account, but very quickly I had over 9 million impressions with the post. Later in high school, me and my group of close high school friends made “mom” twitter accounts. We gave ourselves fake “mom” names, identities that centered around wine and children, and made ironic tweets that would mock a stereotypical “soccer mom”. However, it was not just us. We quickly learned that there was an entire influx of fake mom accounts on Twitter that were created ironically. We interacted with each other, and would basically role-play these roles. It was only funny for a year. I still have the account, in which I turned into a cat fan page for my cat, Appa. Many of these ironic accounts created on various social media platforms will die out quickly, leaving a graveyard of dead accounts.
The fourth and last form is collaborative problem-solving, where people work in teams on the internet to solve a problem, or reach a common goal. One of the first things I thought about was the documentary called “Don’t F*** with Cats” on Netflix. The premise of this documentary is that a group of people, connected together through Facebook, became interested in solving in solving a case of animal cruelty that had circulated online. Through internet sleuths, the perpetrator was found — which led police to discover that the perpetrator had murdered an international student. How did they do this? In the video featuring animal cruelty, internet sleuths were able to identify the location and identity of the person by looking at very specific clues with the little video provided. In posts, this community interacted with each other and bounced off ideas in posts. Through collective knowledge, resources, and interest, this internet community was able to bring justice.
Along with this, the idea of mutual aid networks fits well within this category. Mutual aid networks have existed since at least the 20th century. Eduardo (2020) describes mutual aid networks as “mutual benefit societies’’ providing members with resources like food, shelter, and healthcare. In my experience, these are internet communities that will spread the word on resources needed such as rent money and physical donation items. Marginalized communities are usually prioritized in the process. This has increased dramatically since the beginning of the pandemic which resulted in mass layoffs, and other increased hardships. In June 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in my hometown of Minneapolis, I started to become really involved with mutual-aid efforts on social media. My social media that I used primarily was Instagram, however, other social media like Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter are largely used. Posts are made usually giving a short explanation and explaining what resources are needed and where to send them. Money is common, using ca$happ, venmo, and other money services to send and receive. Due to algorithms, members of this network often will try to “boost” a post. This can be done through a number of strategies, replaying, commenting, quoting, and interaction with a post can increase frequency within an algorithm.
