Ryn Shane-Armstrong's List: Participatory Culture & Media

• Recent advances in technologies (mostly personal computers and the internet) have enabled private persons to create and publish such media, usually through the internet. This new culture as it relates to the internet has been described as Web 2.0.
• The internet has come to play an integral part in the expansion of participatory culture because of its ability to reach large populations of people in a comparatively small amount of time. The potential of participatory culture has been investigated by professor Henry Jenkins of MIT.
• Participatory Culture is also seen as a more democratic form of communication as it stimulates the audience to take an active part because they can input their own ideas and assume a less passive role.

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• According to a 2007 study from the Pew Center for Internet & American Life, more than half of all teens have created media content and roughly a third of teens online have shared content they produced with others.
• Participatory culture stresses the role of teens as creators, circulators, connectors, and collaborators--rather than simply consumers--of media. Young people participate in the creation and circulation of media content within social networks that extend from their circle of face-to-face friends to a larger virtual community around the world.

• Participatory Culture Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit based in Worcester, MA. We were founded in 2005 with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.

• At each level, the goal should be a move from the isolated, passive intake of information towards active engagement with others in reshaping the world around us. Our goals should be to encourage kids to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical framework, and self confidence needed to be full participants in the cultural changes which are taking place in response to the influx of new media technologies.
• There is wide disagreement about how this learning relates to the kinds of skills and knowledge historically valued by schools. Many of these processes, for example, contribute to the development of core research and analysis skills or foster improvements in communication competencies, which can have a direct payoff in schools. Yet, other scholars note that these processes work in part because they are not defined as part of school and are activities which kids choose to do on their own. The goal here is not to simply help kids do better in school but also to help them do better in life and that includes an emphasis on creativity or citizenship related skills which may not be measured on standardized tests.