Week 10

"From Participation to Power"

I chose to focus on the introductory chapter of The Participatory Cultures Handbook, "What Is Participatory Culture?" by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson. This reading gives a detailed overview of how participatory culture developed over time and why it has become such a crucial part of everyday life, especially in our digitally connected world. What I found most interesting was how the author positioned participatory culture, not as something new, but something that has expanded greatly due to technological change and shifts in social expectations around communication and collaboration. I never thought about it in this way, that everything we do online today has roots that go back in time.

The discussion of participatory knowledge cultures really stood out to me. The authors describe how people now work together to collectively organize and build information. The authors draw on Pierre Levy's idea of "collective intelligence" to explain how the internet has become a shared extension of our problem solving abilities and our memory. When I think about how often I rely on sites like WikiHow or restaurant review sites, it's true that these spaces feel like extensions of my own problem solving abilities. The reading made me realize how dependent we are on community created information and how lost we feel when we lose access to it. This idea made more sense to me after seeing how frequently users rely on shared knowledge to navigate everyday life.

The authors explain that participatory cultures are defined by low barriers to artistic expression, strong support for creating and sharing, and a sense that people's contributions genuinely matter. I resonated with this definition because it reflects what digital spaces feel like today. Platforms like TikTok show how anyone can create, remix, and circulate content. Participatory culture is no longer confined to niche fandoms or tech savvy groups, it has turned into a global, everyday reality. Online platforms are used to produce, alter, and circulate content in ways that were once limited to major institutions such as broadcast media and newspapers.

Overall this reading showed me how participatory culture has shifted alongside technological change, moving from early bulletin boards and fan forums to global platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok. Delwiche and Henderson demonstrate that participatory culture is more than just people posting online, it reflects a cultural shift toward collective knowledge, collaboration, and spread out distributions of power. This chapter made me aware of how much of my daily online life depends on the contributions of others, and how participatory culture is shaping the way we learn, communicate, and create in society today.