Participatory Culture Essay

1186 Words3 Pages

It is a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers. We are in a moment of time in which an explosion of new media technology has made it very easy for everyday people to take media in their own hands to create, to share, to express themselves, through every possible media channel. Participatory culture could be defined as new ways of life that lead people to create and circulate new self-made content including video, audio, text, and images. The movement is taking shape and being popularized by consumer social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Wikipedia that encourage mass participation and collaboration. Participatory culture is changing the way people and the media communicate and actively engage. The characteristic that define modern participatory culture is that consumption is no longer the only way we used media like in the past. We have started to expand our focus to include producing and sharing media too which can be found in any form or content. Example would be fan communities, groups of gamers, the blogging population, and various sub cultures online. What these groups have in common is their supportive environments in which to create and share. There is an assumption that anyone who is currently a reader could become a writer, anyone who is a consumer can become a producer. Participatory culture fostered by new media is like a communication triathlon involving consumption, production, and sharing leads to more knowledge. Many of these tools allow us to remix, recirculate, content from media as a mode of creative expression. There is an informal training process for experienced participants help newbies acquire the skills they need to be...

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...e same time, the time has come to raise consciousness, support research and standard-setting, and prepare model codes for those systems that do employ privacy-enhancing technologies. The opportunities for individuals to customize privacy preferences, research should be conducted to evaluate alternative arrangements should be generated. On top of that, the digital applications should provide transparent criteria, including ease of understanding, adequacy of notification, compliance with standards, contractual fairness and enforceability, appropriate choice of defaults, efficiency relative to the potential benefits, and integration with other means of privacy protection. Particular attention should be paid to uniformity of protocols across different industries and applications, so that consumers are not overwhelmed by a pointless diversity of interfaces and contracts.

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