Participations: Dialogues on the Participatory Promise of Contemporary Culture and Politics (original) (raw)

Dialogues on the Participatory Promise of Contemporary Culture and Politics

There have been long-standing discussions of "participation" in political theory. So, what ideas from this literature do we think might be useful for discussing the "participatory turn" in contemporary culture? To what degree has the rise of networked computing encouraged us to reimagine the public sphere? If we can move this discussion beyond established frames, such as "Twitter revolutions" or "slactivism," what meaningful claims can we make about the ways that expanding access to the means of media production and circulation has impacted the available political identities, tactics, and discourses? Has the expansion of communicative capacity impacted the range of political options available to groups that have historically been disenfranchised from political elites and institutionalized politics? What obstacles have blocked the full achievement of the promises of a more participatory culture?

A Politics of Judgment?: Alienation and Platformized Creative Labor

International Journal of Communication, 2023

What possibilities for collective struggle exist within platformized creative labor processes? The platformization of creative labor exacerbates barriers to collective resistance such as widespread entrepreneurial dispositions and divergence in terms of workers' experiences, narratives, practices, and class interests. I show how routine and expressive workers involved in the production of YouTube content share a distinctive dispossession: alienated judgment. Based upon 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted within a YouTube management company and interviews with managers, office staff, and content producers, I argue that alienated judgment provides a possibility for collective resistance across creative class fractions. Creative labor requires judgment, yet routine and expressive workers' use of judgment tends to be subordinate to both management and platforms' affordances and governance. I conclude by highlighting major obstacles to collective resistance among creative workers while holding out the possibility that alienated judgment provides for the articulation of workers' experience and thus a point around which the digital economy's divided labor might organize.

Participation and Media Production

2017

Every decade or so, the academy is gripped by a fascination with an imperative to understand a particular theory, epistemology, or change in the world. Following the initial flurry of activity and debate, the legacy of the research that results generally outlasts the early excitement, spawning further waves of elaboration and critique before a new fascination emerges. This is not to say that we are the mere pawns of fashion, but rather that research is social, shaped by human communication processes and subject to highs and low in intensity, convergence, and significance. Today, the field of media and communication is fascinated by the social and technological transformations in the conditions by which communication can be created-as evidenced by the public's enthusiastic appropriation of social networking, file sharing, message services, blogs, and wikis. Though more obvious in wealthy countries, parallel shifts now occur in developing countries, indicating how the affordances of these networked, hybrid, and convergent information and communication technologies are themselves shaped by processes of globalisation, democratisation, and privatisation. As the public rushes to become practitioners, experimenting with and enjoying the new opportunities to communicate in potentially vast networks, the academy is, for once, keeping pace-thinking about, researching, and deliberating over these opportunities, while also engaging with and advising designers, activists, policy makers, and governments. All this seems to demand new concepts, new methods, and ever more multidisciplinary research. Yet until recently, our field has been comfortably bifurcated into the highly contrasted modes of one-to-one communication (predominantly conducted face-to-face throughout most of human history) and one-to-many communication (this potential for mass communication arising only through the particular historical conjunction of the rise of mass society and the development of mass media technologies in the late industrial age). Though new developments may have a short history, they also have a long past. Communication historians have been charting the blurring and

DIVERSE MEDIUMS, COLLECTIVE VOICE: Exploring Interdisciplinary Connections

Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, Udaipur, 2008

The creative impulses of a culture give rise to a rich world of myths, legends and folklore- stories of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines and other mythological themes. The colourful world of the traditional arts and crafts is a further manifestation of this world. Thus they are in essence mediums of communication- storytellers carrying forward the voice of a culture. In our modern-day world of rampant materialistic preoccupations there is an urgent need for these voices to be strengthened and heard. One of the ways of doing this is by bringing these diverse mediums together to explore a collective voice. 'Diverse Mediums, Collective Voice: Exploring Interdisciplinary Connections' is a workshop module developed by Ajit Rao to address these issues.