Transcriber: Julie Walker Reviewer: uzz li
Today, I'm going to talk to you about participatory culture
which is a concept that I've been exploring and developing
over the last 20-something years.
So, I was writing about participatory culture
before the internet, or at least before the internet
hit most people's lives.
And, for me, I always draw a distinction between participatory culture
and participatory media or technologies.
In this talk, I'm going to be talking very much about that concept
in relation to new media literacies, but also, and primarily, in relation
to civic engagement.
This is work that's been funded in recent years
by the MacArthur Foundation, by the Knight Foundation,
and, most recently, by the Annenburg School of Journalism and Communication.
I'll begin with a story. And, this is the story of Peter.
And, Peter lives in New York. So, he's a resident not too far from here.
He lives with his aunt and his uncle.
Peter considers himself to be a master of the webs, and he's involved
in a great deal of adolescent identity play.
He's got multiple identities, multiple ways of seeing himself
and acting upon the world.
Peter uses social network sites to connect with his friends
including people at a nearby private academy
that he has strong ties to.
And, he's also an amateur photographer
whose begun posting his photographs online.
His photographs have been so good that they've gotten the attention
of the local newspaper, and he's beginning to publish his photographs there.
He also is deeply invested in his community
and takes action, both individually and collectively
to make the world around him a better place.
His uncle is fond of noting that he has in his hands
more power than any previous generation could have imagined.
And, with great power comes great responsibility.
By now, you've probably guessed
that my Peter, in this case, is Peter Parker,
better known as Spiderman.
And, I've framed the beginning of my talk in that way to make a point,
which is that in our imaginations, we readily accept the idea
that young people do things in the world that matter,
that young people can take responsibility and change the world around them,
that young people are active social agents,
and that young people need space to pursue those interests,
and those interests need to be taken seriously.
I've also begun the story this way, because I want to illustrate
the ways we can use popular culture as tools and resources to think with
and to think about the changing environment around us.
So, one of the things that changed about Peter Parker
in the time that I've been a comic book fanboy,
is that Peter Parker once needed to be deeply embedded in a newspaper.
Indeed, all superheroes were tied to systems of large-scale communication
in order to get access to information with which to make sense
of the world around them, to identify problems and act upon them.
And, increasingly, they've been dispersed.
Peter has lost his job recently at the newspaper.
He doesn't need it any more.
He's got access to the internet, and indeed, more and more Peter Parker
gets his information about the world streaming through
digital technology channels.
The second thing about Peter Parker is that Peter Parker belongs in a society
where adults and young people relate to each other as equals.
There's a lot of talk about digital natives
and digital immigrants.
For me, the important point is, in fact, the really successful stories
are places where young people and adults meet each other on equal footing
based on common interests.
And, it's a good thing that Peter's not judged by his age.
Given that Thor is about 400, 500 years old,
all of us look young by the standards Thor sets.
And, Peter makes mistakes.
His aunt looks after him and follows up behind him,
but he's able to take risks and pursue interests with an adult
that watches his back, doesn't snoop over his shoulder.
This is all part of what I call a participatory culture.
So, for a white paper I wrote for MacArthur about 4 years ago,
I got interested in the fact
that the Pew Center for Internet and American Life
was showing at the time that about 58% of American teens had produced media.
Today, the number's about 65% of American teens.
About a third of those teens have shared that media they've produced
with a community larger than friends and family.
So, there's a communication shift that's going on
as more and more young people are becoming participants in their society.
Now, we didn't accept the premise that we should just take
a laissez-faire attitude, that these should be feral children
of the internet and they should be raised by the wolves of Web 2.0.
(Laughter)
Instead, we suggested that there were basic skills and knowledge
they still needed to acquire.
We identified 12 social skills and cultural competencies,
in this white paper, needed to fully participate
in this new environment.
Now, this is the way we normally represent these sets of social developments,
through technologies.
This chart shows us 3 phases of technological development.
The logic of that argument is that a participatory culture
somehow grows out of those technological platforms.
I want to take us back to Web negative 10.
(Laughter)
The 1850s, young people were using toy printing presses
to publish what we would now call zines, which were circulating around the country.
There was a national circuit, the Amateur Press Association.
These teens developed codes and initials, phrases like LLL, that they would use
because they had to hand-set the type in printing out these publications.
And, many of the terms we now use in the internet
trace their history back to that period of time,
these social networks, these virtual communities
that existed around print.
We could carry the notion of participatory culture forward -
this is only one of many multiple histories
of participatory culture - to the amateur radio operators
of the 1920s, where schools, boy scout troops, churches
operated their own radio stations, and young people took ownership
of communication resources in their own community.
We could carry it forward through the science-fiction community,
which began, by about the 1930s, to be publishing its own zines,
providing cultural criticism, speculating about the limits
of science and technology, and forward still to the underground press
of the 1960s, which became the key voice of the counter-culture,
or forward to Super 8 and camcorder activists,
who were using those technologies to build social networks again
and make a difference in the world, and forward to the indie movement
which used radio and the web to, again, create alternative channels
of communication.
That's the history I think we should pay attention to,
not the history of technologies, because what we see here
is this community, these people, participatory culture, took advantage
of every new technology, as it was presented, as a vehicle
by which to participate, to engage with the world,
to make a difference in their community.
Now, through the MacArthur work, I make the case
that participatory culture is a rich site of informal learning.
Because there are low barriers for engagement,
strong support for sharing creations with others,
informal mentorship, members believe their contributions matter.
They care about each others' opinions of self and worth.
These are key ideas.
Now, by the way, the slide illustrates the idea of participatory culture,
because a couple of years ago, I punched that phrase into Google search,
and up came this slide.
Someone had taken my white paper, turned it into an image
better than the one I would have used, and so ever since, I've used it
in my presentations. (Laughter)
And, that's precisely how participatory culture works.
We throw ideas out into the world.
We bring them back in an improved way
because of our engagement with communities.
So, a couple of years ago, I was in Chile and met this guy,
who's a senator, Fernando Flores Labra, who looks, as you can see,
like a Latin-American senator.
But, the difference is that he's an absolute passionate player
of World of Warcraft and believes that World of Warcraft holds the key
for thinking about the future of Latin America. (Laughter)
He believes that young people connecting on line with each other,
collaborating, forming teams, developing leadership skills,
that work with people around the world, who they may never know face-to-face,
holds the potential for inserting Latin America more decisively
into a global conversation.
Now, we can think about what he has to say
about World of Warcraft with what Rober Putnam told us
about bowling.
That is, Robert Putnam tells us, in the 1950s,
the bowling league was the center of civic life
in small-town America.
People gathered to bowl, but they also had a range
of other conversations that took place around that practice.
And, the social network that emerges from that becomes key
to political engagement in the period that is to follow.
Now, he has a kind of dire, downward-turned look at these things,
but I think we want to revisit his arguments,
not in terms of television, but in terms of the internet.
And I would argue that whatever is going on in World of Warcraft,
it's not bowling alone.
This group of people, like the group of bowlers before,
is a community which has taken mutual interest in each other,
extending beyond what's in the game to larger parts of their lives.
This becomes a meeting point and a place of exchange,
only it's an exchange not rooted geographically,
but rooted on a global scale.
What we've seen is that games are an enormous platform
for various forms of civic and political activism
whether it's the Ron Paul movement using World of Warcraft
to this massive protest that took place in one of the multi-player games in China,
a protest that probably couldn't take place
in physical space, at least post-Tiananmen Square,
but can take place in a virtual environment.
Games have become a platform by which people are expressing
their political concerns.
This is part of a larger picture.
Many of you have seen the studies that show that young people
get more of their information about the world
through popular culture, including comedy news shows like these
rather than through traditional journalism.
And, as someone in a journalism department who cares greatly about the future
of journalism, this worries me.
As someone who cares about the future of civic engagement,
it doesn't worry me nearly as much, because these shows often represent
alternative perspectives that are not in the mainstream news.
They critique the frame of news.
They dig into the archive and present images
and contextualize things in ways that traditional news has not.
As platforms for thinking about the world, they're doing really important work,
and they're a part of this larger way in which the line
between participatory culture and public participation
is starting to break down.
Now, this is not new.
Again, thinking historically, we can argue that previous generations' ideas
about democracy were also shaped by popular culture.
Here we see Norman Rockwell's covers for Saturday Evening Post
and Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
as earlier forms of popular culture that taught people things about democracy.
It embedded the logic of democracy into the practices of their everyday life.
And, we can go backwards and forwards in time,
forwards to rock music and underground comics,
backwards to the Tea Party, the original Tea Party,
where people were playing dress-up and dumping tea in the harbor,
building on carnivalesque traditions from old Europe.
And, we can go forward to the present moment
where, in fact, we're seeing the mobilization of participatory culture
by groups like Move On around the Obama campaign,
and to sort of think about where did the people get the skills
that allowed them to produce videos for Obama that circulated on YouTube?
And, in many cases, it may have been people learning
how to film themselves skateboarding.
It may have been gamers using machinima.
It could have been any number of popular culture,
participatory culture practices that taught them their skills.
Just as in a hunting society, we play with bows and arrows,
in an information society, we play with information.
In a mediated culture, we play with media, and that play, in fact,
becomes a powerful form of teaching.
Now, that play is now being harnessed by new kinds of political organizations,
like this one: The Harry Potter Alliance.
The founder, a 20-something named Andrew Slack,
starts with the premise that Harry Potter is the story
of a young man who questioned authority and changed the world,
that he lived in a world where the newspapers lied
about what was happening.
The government refused to acknowledge real problems,
and his school suppressed political speech,
but he organized his classmates into the Dumbledore's Army
and went out and changed the world.
That's a powerful image for young activists.
So, if we had a Dumbledore's Army today, what would they do?
Who would they work with?
And, he works with both fan groups, like wizard rock groups.
This is Harry and the Potters.
He works with free press and Amnesty International.
He's organized around human rights issues, around worker rights issues,
around gay marriage.
Most recently, he wrote me this morning to say they'd raised enough money
to support 3 cargo planes to Haiti, named Hermione, Harry, and Ron.
(Laughter)
They're delivering supplies down there to make a difference in that community.
He's got now 100,000 young people around the world who are involved
in civic activism in the name of Harry Potter,
a pretty remarkable set of developments.
We're seeing that popular culture leads to new kinds of political awareness.
This group, AANG Ain't White, now known as Racebender,
organized in response to the filming of a version of Nickelodeon's show,
Last Airbender, in which all of the people of color were recast
by white actors.
And, they've organized to call attention to the whitewashing of characters,
the sort of racial politics of casting.
This has extended from a focus on one anime series
to a whole variety of issues.
And, these are teenagers and young adults educating themselves.
about race in America.
It can come right through your door.
This is a group called The Living Room Rock Gods,
who try to duplicate the keyboard skills, the drumming skills
of their favorite rock performers, put it out on YouTube.
But, predictably enough, if they get close enough to the original,
the technology tries to see if they're pirating
and shuts them down.
It's a point of pride, but also a point of anger.
So, they've organized this group, Tribute is not Theft, to call attention
to the politics of copyright, take-down notices, and so forth.
This is a more traditional group, Invisible Children.
It's an activist group concerned with Uganda, but it's taking the language
of popular culture, participatory culture, and works to engage young people
with political change.
So, it borrows from Michael Jackson, from High School Musical,
from reality television.
It produces what Stephen Duncombe would call ethical spectacles
that are participatory, transparent, playful, but mobilize people
on an ongoing basis, not just to give their time and money,
but to actively engage in a relationship with the developing world.
Now, we've seen signs of the start to leak out of this.
This image up here of the Joker Obama originated on a site in a community
called 4chan that, in fact, just spit out lots of variants
on the Joker tied to different political figures.
For them, it was a game. Can we make mimes?
Can we spread them out to a larger population?
This one got picked up, has been on the national news.
It's sort of become a rallying point for conservatives in America.
But, what it does is translate politics through a language of popular culture.
It gets us out of the policy wonk discourse
and into something that's much more engaged
with things people already know and care about.
Now, what comes around goes around.
We can see during the campaign that supporters had depicted McCain
as the Penguin and Obama as Batman.
We've seen that there were images during the campaign
that made Obama into Spock. (Laughter)
We've seen that the comic book world has connected Obama in a variety of ways
to the figure of the superhero. (Laughter)
And, we see that, in fact, Obama himself has sort of played around (Laughter)
with that analogy.
So, the language of the superhero, of comics, and of science fiction
has become a way that we make sense of our fanboy-in-chief. (Laughter)
Now, this is the global phenomenon.
Some of you saw the other day in the news a protest march in Palestine
where people dressed up like the Na'vi from Avatar.
And, in fact, across many parts of the world, there have been already
protest marches similar to this one where people paint themselves blue.
On Twitter, we paint ourselves green, but it's more or less the same thing.
It's the idea of using the language of James Cameron's films to speak back
to power.
This is a protest march in Singapore where there are prohibitions
on public gatherings, and so people came one by one
and plopped down an action figure to stand in for them
as a figure of protest.
And, that over there, believe it or not, is a rally about Pop Idol in India.
Around the world, we've seen Pop Idol become a centerpiece for debates
about democracy.
I hear a lot about more young people voted for American Idol than voted
in the last election.
Not true, by the way. More votes cast. But, if you could speed-dial
in the last election and vote as many times as you wanted,
there would've been a lot more votes in American politics. (Laughter)
But, what's interesting is that, around the world, Pop Idol has become
a franchise that sparks debates about democracy.
So, why hasn't it happened here?
That may say more about our culture than it says about the franchise.
So, where does that leave us?
These groups are mobilizing skills kids have,
knowledge they care about, passions they have toward new causes.
But, our schools are locking out many of these practices.
Our schools are turning down Wikipedia, shutting off YouTube,
blocking social network sites.
And, this, I think, is a challenge for those of us in this room.
If we think what I described here works on an organizational level
to mobilize citizenship, shouldn't we bring it into our classrooms?
So, I end there.
(Applause)