Participatory Media

Participatory media can be described by technology  that allows users to communicate and interact with other users. Participatory media includes many things like blogs, wikis, music sharing, photo sharing, and video sharing. Our Media Arts and Technology blog is a great example of a participatory media. Through this blog we are able to interact with other people involved with our I-310 class. We can post comments, videos, and link other types of media for everyone to view. With the advancement of technology media is mostly many-to-many participatory media as apposed to one-to-many participatory media, like it was in the past. Now people are able to read and write on pages to show their views and make comments on any given subject. In the past people were only able to read-only on the world wide web.

Participatory Culture – Goodwell – 10/18 – reading summary

The website states, “The Internet grants new powers of collective action to those who master its literacy.” Here they are talking about the participatory culture that we have with the internet, ways that we can collaborate and debate with one another to learn more. They describe participatory media as follows, “Technological changes in accessibility of production tools and distribution media have led to social, cultural, economic, political changes in the ways people communicate, a set of technologies, practices, and skills some call participatory media.”

Some examples of participatory media include blogs, RSS, social bookmarking, wikis, tagging, mashups, videoblogs and music-photo-video sharing. Within these types of media they have characteristics that make them participatory. These include:

– many to many media – it is now possible for everyone to share their information to anyone else around the world that is connected to the internet.

– social networks – easier access to communicate and inform others faster, cheaper and more efficiently about activities or events.

– social media – is the active participation of many people.

The availability of participatory media allows us much better access to information that we were not able to acquire before.