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.

Lister “New” in New Media – Goodwell – 9/22 – Application

Our class discussion reminded me about this new way of experience music with friends. The silent disco concept is where there are two DJ’s playing different songs and the people can choose which channel to listen to by tuning in their individual wireless headphones.

This idea is not entirely new it is similar to going to a club and listening to music with friends but in this setting you can be listening to different songs while dancing with your friends. While you are listening the people around you are having their own music experience that could be different than yours. It is really interesting to listen to the crowd without any music playing to the entire crowd. All you can hear is bad singing and sometimes to completely different songs.

This is a new medium of technology but not a completely new technology. We have headphones and concerts but we have never combined the two in order to create this atmosphere. The wireless headphone technology allows this to work.