Jenkins and Participatory Culture

Jenkin’s piece discusses the concept of audience participation in media. He describes it as, “a succession of media technologies which enable average citizens to participate in the archiving annotation, appropriation, transformation, and recirculation of media content.” I really like his ideology on this subject because it describes the cycle of how so much media content is produced and what it creates. In CMC 200 I recently gave a presentation on “Mash-Up” culture, a new form of music that is created by artists using computers to use samples of many popular songs to produce a new song, that demonstrates this concept. A lot of theory behind its creation is based on the idea that the people creating this form of music are doing it as a rebellion against the mainstream media. There has been a lot of controversy over this genre because it uses something that has already been created and is labeled as being new, and it also goes against a lot of media producers and corporations. Jenkins says, “Media consumers want to become media producers, while media producers want to maintain dominance over media content.” So many great products come out from new media forms being produced and there are many new styles that are created from these “consumers” that challenge the norm. Since the audience is the one who controls what becomes popular, I think that it is important to study what happens when they challenge what they see.