Participatory Culture On Social Media

What is participatory culture is a culture with low barriers for expression and civic engagement, and support for creating and sharing creation as well as offering mentorship to others. The description of participatory culture fits well with social media as many people uses social media to create and share content to others online.

This is interesting to me because like what I mention earlier this is what I and many people online do on social media creating photos and videos and sending them to digital platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. This also isn’t something we just do time from time, this has became a common part in our lives whether we use it or not. We have seen the evolution of social media since the very beginning. It went from connect to friends and family to becoming a business and communities building platform.

What inspires me to participate online is when I want to connect with those who i haven’t talked to in a long time due to life getting in the way or they simply live far away. So I would have social media as any opportunities to connect with people I know. When Covid originally started, all of us was stuck indoors not knowing how long we will be in this situation. Because of this many of us turn and rely on the internet now more than we ever before as it was our main source for entertainment and our main way to contact people who we can’t visit while on quarantine. The only difference I would say I have on my social media experience before and during quarantine would be that I am more active on social media than I was in the past. When it comes to social media, I wasn’t very active on it as I would check it once every few days. Now i’m active in social media almost everyday. A couple of examples of the content I shared on social media was during the beginning of COVID-19, I posted old photos that I have sharing what life was before COVID. I wasn’t the only one doing as many of my friends did this as well. Personally I believe COVID was a example of how in today’s world, we rely on digital technology to help get through our life as in the article “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” the author said that “we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced.”

One social media, I would choose to connect with participatory culture would be Instagram. Instagram is one of the biggest social media platform out there. While TikTok have already shown themselves as a very popular social media app, IG is still that big platform that people turns to often when sharing social media content. I remember when i created my second IG account after my first one was lost. I told people from other social media apps that I made a new one and it was amazing to see how fast I gotten follow requests on IG. I was expected it to be a while before I recovered everything that I got in my old account, but within two days I already past over 100 followers without really doing much, which shows how active people are in Instagram. Beside connecting with people you know, you can also develop networks with communities within social media engaging in with people with similar similarities or learning something new among groups you don’t know very well. In Henry Jenkins Ted Talk, he mentioned how “we throw ideas out into the world, and we bring them back in an improved way because of our engagement with communities.” This is important because how powerful communities become when we bond and learn from each other. To me participatory culture is often ignored because of the whole stigma that people see social media as someone posting photos and videos just to get likes and followers misses out on the opportunities that social media can offer to an individual who can learn from people sharing their experience in social media and grow their character not only for themselves, but as well as helping to grow their communities. As social media tends to expand and become more involved in our daily lives, we tend learn and understand how social media is actually a tool that we can use to build existing and new communities as well as bringing in awareness and resolving issues around the world.