Everyone on the earth can be a participant in culture. All you have to do is connect to the Internet so that you can communicate with people on the other side of the world. To me, participatory culture is something that emphasizes the output of mass ideas and values. You may say it is a shared world culture that is relatively applicable for people from different historical backgrounds. In other words, this is how freedom of speech can be demonstrated more unofficially and ideologically. No need to be an expert in one industry, everybody's free to contribute to cultural development on the media platforms, such as social apps, blogging, film making, or even Wikipedia.
It reminds me of some examples of how participatory culture works. I believe that most of you have heard about 'something something challenge', like "Try Not to Cringe Challenge" or "Weird Food Challenge". Of course, the well-known "Ice Bucket Challenge" is the most famous in the family. It was promoted by celebrities and raised a lot of donations. These challenges can share a charity purpose that shows support and care to socially vulnerable groups or just contain an only entertaining intention. As you see, there is a trend of "challenge" culture. You can do this challenge if you get the heart to resonate with the community. Either of them is enhancing participation in society.
Another interesting finding is parody becomes a fashionable activity to satirize social phenomena or directly to some politicians. Parody's feature is to imitate characters from the original work or a real person, which can be in the form of literature, music, theater, TV & movie, and animation. Obviously, it is created for making fun or irony or both. Drawing a very typical example, Donald Trump has been the hottest parody material in recent years. You can always find some amusing pictures or videos of him after carrying out the outrageous policies. It is considered that the public is using humorous expressions to present their dissatisfaction to the President.
If you are an active user of social media, you cannot escape from participatory culture, and that includes me. I frequently check my Instagram and Facebook page, and I somehow understand and discover the culture through these social media. It provides an excellent medium for those contributors to share their creativity. I receive tonnes of information per day on social media to know more about the dynamic world. It gives you the feeling that you are associated with the community, and you care about what happened in society and the world. Actually, there is value in learning from the participatory culture. We collect lots of messages from the separated entities, so we need to respect and filtrate the information from very different values and cultures. The participatory culture has impacted something in me, which is to appreciate the culture contributors' creation. By the way, this blog is created to share some of my thoughts with you, so I AM the contributor now. How about you? Are you a culture contributor?
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