BG 10/21 participatory culture

One of the key concepts from the Jenkins reading is participatory culture. Jenkins said that participatory culture was one of the two models of media in transition. Jenkins states:

“Patterns of media consumption have been profoundly altered by a succession of new media technologies which enable average citizens to participate in the archiving, annotation, appropriation, transformation, and recirculation of media content. Participatory culture refers to the new style of consumerism that emerges in this environment.” (pp. 554)

This section on participatory culture made me think of Roland Barthes’ Pleasure of the Text. It seems that participatory culture is just jouissance (the pleasure derived from filling in the gap) taken a few steps further. Barthes viewed the pleasure of the text as the joy we get from inserting our own experiences in the middle of a text to create personal meaning, whereas in Jenkins participatory culture, audience members not only inject meaning into the text, but they take it upon themselves to extend the text to create a personal meaning and share it with others.

This concept of altering the text itself and reproducing it is much like Barthes notion of the perversion of the text, but taken a step further. Rather than just perverting the text in one’s own mind, individuals pervert the text and then produce a new text to reflect this perversion. It really is no longer the process of tmesis because audience members are not only interjecting something in the middle of the text, but they are creating entirely new texts within the realm created by the original.

Criticism is an act of tmesis, but participatory culture (for example fan fiction) is not just criticism of the original, it is the creation of an entirely new text or a modification of the original. This new tmesis is different from the old because one is analysis and the other is synthesis.

This whole process is enabled by technological innovation. Technology enables fans to not only record fan fiction (with a video camera), but it allows them to produce it (with video editing software), and more importantly, technology enables citizens to share what they have produce (with utilities such as YouTube).