Participatory culture. That’s what the 21st Century is about. Along with the rapid advancements, the use of new mediums such as Snapchat, Facebook, Periscope, Youtube (Prism is an account that entails the lives of children in Bangladesh), Rabbit and Blab are all forms that enable information to be spread rapidly, without filtering information. Twitter’s rapid fire response system enables citizen journalism at its finest.
My digital artefact of using emoji’s is only an expansion of participatory culture – Anyone can respond, can have an opinion on the topic. Instead of a discussion of my emotions, short images (emoji’s) can convey tones and message far quicker than saying them aloud.
With the mass media used as a gatekeeper for information, the rise of citizen journalists has enabled larger user-generated content and a removal of gatekeepers through the expansion of new mediums to convey new messages.
In saying this, as a public we have developed user-generated content to discuss what we want, when we want.
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Hey Jess, I think you’re completely right in saying that the 21st century is all about participatory culture. People want to get involved in things, they want their voices to be heard and they want to have a say in things. I think that’s what made social media and as an extension citizen journalism so apparent and popular within our culture. You don’t have to ‘be someone’ to participate in discussions or news stories that you would normally be boxed out of it were traditional media forms. However, do you think it could also be a problem since there are no gatekeepers? That way there’s also the chance of false information being spread and usually the thing about the internet is that once wrong information is out there it’s very hard to tell everyone that said information was wrong because of the vastness of the internet.
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