Participatory Culture

Introduction

With the answer to the question heading towards a more interactive and personal CBBC environment it is important to look at participatory habits and the new culture that has evolved. Henry Jenkins is an academic social media theorist that gives a good insight into participatory cultures. 

What is Participatory Culture?

Participatory culture is the notion that users of the internet can interact with others and essentially create their own media.  Henry Jenkins outlines four different types of participatory cultures:

1. Affiliations- This involves memberships and being involved in a message boards and forums. Facebook is also a strong example as it has many users who participate in it. 
2. Expressions- This involves users uploading content such as videos and is considered to be more of an artistic participation effort. 
3. Collaborative Problem-solving- This is when  many users participate in changing content and problem solving such as wikipedia.
4. Circulations- This involves how users create their own content such as blogs which can shape the flow of the media.

Henry Jenkins also has studied children with the participatory culture that has forced its way into society.  He argues that the youth are born into the participatory culture and learn themselves how to be involved in the media. He also highlights that there are skills the youth are gaining that they would not learn without the internet and new advancing technologies. These new skills involve:

• Multi-tasking
• Transmedia Navigation
• Performance
• Networking

If these are the skills that the youth are said to have at an early age then surely the CBBC should encourage aspects of these skills in order to fuel their knowledge and prepare them for the "real world".  The youth should not be underestimated in their skills on the internet and therefore, the CBBC should maybe allow them to get more out of their website and allow them to be creative and produce some of their own content. 

Important Points to Consider:

Henry Jenkins notices that multi-tasking can be confused with being off task. Multi-tasking is a good skill to have as it is the skill to look at a sea of information and take the main elements  from it. However, where the youth is concerned, they are seen as disengaged when they have multiple windows open.

"The new mediated landscape of mainstream news sources, collaborative blog projects, unsourced news sites, and increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques aimed at ever-younger consumers demand that students be taught how to distinguish fact from fiction, argument from documentation, real from fake, and marketing from enlightenment." (Jenkins, p 4)

The quote above highlights the main concerns of the participatory culture that is upon us as the internet landscape is heavily mediated and any can produce content whether it is true or not. Therefore, the youth need a reliable website where they can participate in a harmless environment which is why CBBC has a great opportunity to be bigger than it already is.

Useful Links:
Henry Jenkins Article