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Comic book fandom has long been a participatory culture. As comic book characters made the transition to film, the fans, eschewing media boundaries, began effectively applying their collaborative traditions to cinema. This process became more intensive and far-reaching in the digital age. Consequently, filmmakers, many of whom initially adopted a protectionist stance, have chosen to (or been forced to) recognize the merits of comic book publishing practices. In recent years, this has led to a refocusing of marketing campaigns, the development of new production practices, greater fidelity between texts, as well as a number of other strategies that position fans at the center of comic book adaptation production.

This concluding chapter suggests future directions for the research and practice of cross-cultural technology in a glocalization age. Centering on a dialogical approach, it analyzes what the cross-cultural design community could learn from the user localization efforts to design for, invoke, nurture, encourage, support, and sustain culturally localized user experience —the consummate experience—for emerging technologies. It studies the characteristics and value as well as the role and functions of user localization in a technology’s whole design, production, and use cycle and discusses how to route those user efforts into the design process to better address user needs and expectations in this rising participatory culture. Real-world examples are supplemented to further the discussion beyond the case study when needed.

This chapter focuses on technologies as spaces to create content, and in the process, to promote the development of competence. Competence is defined as the possession of a skill, knowledge, or capacity. In this context, competence refers to the ability to use technology to create or design personally meaningful projects, to accomplish a goal, and to debug projects and problem-solve. When one uses technology to create content, one also learns how to organize the content domain and how to choose the core ideas. This set of new ideas will be referred in the book as powerful ideas from the content domain. This chapter highlights how children can create digital content, especially through computer programming. Aside from programming, children can engage in the participatory culture of the internet, creating content that is shared with millions. As children become competent by creating digital projects, they are prepared to enter a world in which technological fluency is key.

This chapter argues that memetic participation complicates the culture industries that remain at the heart of public life. It assesses the ambivalent relationship between collective participation and individual expression, especially when age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new means of sharing information. It focuses on the complex relationship between collectivism, publicity, and fame in memetic media, as well as on concerns about commercialism and authenticity in a seemingly open media ecology. The tapestry of conversation afforded by memetic media is part new precedent and part established infrastructure. Memetic media intertwine with established culture industries; ambivalent network gatekeeping enables both restrictive commercial control of mediated participation and conversations open enough to cast doubts on the credibility of information. In this way, memetic media exhibit new potentials and old tensions.

Despite the increasing tendency for documentary to function as political discourse, there is little historical work addressing the rhetorical and material influence of documentary in public life. These stories of documentary impulse and political struggle have been only erratically recorded. Documentary scholarship frequently addresses the issues that surround the process of social change, focusing on the screen as the central location for communicative exchange, but there are many other sites of struggle for those working on the ground with documentary and the political process. This chapter will cover the broader questions of documentary and social change, how it functions in relation to generating participatory media cultures. The chapter will specifically address the shifts in the documentary commons and how opportunities for social change emerged as it moved through the introduction of portable analog video recording equipment in the late 1960s and on into a digital culture of new media. This chapter will contribute to articulating the ways in which documentary is a distinct form of discourse that engages the political in patterned ways, creating a mediated commons for the engagement of political struggle.

This chapter explores two aspects of contemporary society, digital media and participatory culture, as each holds great potential for expanding, modifying, and potentially restructuring music teacher education programs. Assisting pre-service music educators to develop the skills, understanding, and dispositions to weave together musicianship with digital media and participatory culture necessitates an understanding of digital media’s characteristics, processes, and the cultural contexts in which they are situated. This chapter outlines and contextualizes aspects of participatory culture and five characteristics of digital media (digital, networked, interactive, hypertextual, and virtual) in terms of musical engagement, teaching, and learning, with a focus on pre-service music education. The chapter provides a foundation for addressing twenty-first-century musicianship, digital media, and participatory culture in existing curricular structures and through collaborative projects that span undergraduate curricula.

This chapter examines the history, production, and content of the Latina/o identified literary culture blog, La Bloga, which, the author argues, deviates from predominant understandings of digital media use, participatory culture, and its democratic political value. Through close textual analysis of blog content and history, as well as blogger interviews, the study finds not only that La Bloga’s use of digital media differs from participatory culture paradigms, but that these differences are facilitated through the vehicle of literary culture and register a legacy of Chicano/a cultural politics. Specifically, the essay unpacks how scholars have delineated a relationship between participatory media and participatory politics that privileges liberal philosophy and the concept of the ideal public sphere to the exclusion of other contextual histories such as the social movements of the 1960s. The analysis of La Bloga offers a broader understanding of digital participatory media, cultural politics, and Latina/o online practice.

This chapter argues that memetic media carry the potential for polyvocal public voice, even given their everyday antagonisms. Focusing on mediated conversations surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement, it addresses tensions between populism and pastiche when popular culture is part of public commentary. Vernacular creativity can be utilized for collective civic talk, as participants create, circulate, and transform memetic media in the name of critique, discussion, and argument. Memetic logics, grammar, and vernacular underscore a system of assertion and response, of point and counter-point as public participants contribute their expressive strands to vast public debates. Even if individual contributions are ambivalent and factionist, memetic media can indeed facilitate vibrant polyvocal participation, and our public conversations are stronger when they do.

We are living in a historical moment that will be known for its emphasis on media engagement. The evolution of mobile media technology, the ubiquity of social media, and the omnipresence of multiple media platforms in each of our lives have led to new and evolving modes of interaction with the experience of the media screen. The interactive conditions of digital culture in the United States align with a significant historical moment: growing political and social upheaval, economic crisis, dissatisfaction with representative government, and disillusionment with state institutions. Together, these conditions have given rise to an emerging participatory media culture(s) engaged in addressing problems, exposing exploitation, facilitating media witnessing, and taking back the means of media production and circulation. The chapter argues for an understanding of documentary practice as a mediated commons. This book focuses on how the visual culture(s) of documentary moving images are harnessed as a means of resistance in forms that include witnessing, petition, solidification, polarization, and promulgation. It will examine the ways in which documentary as a mode of production engages in the process of social change.

This chapter introduces the fundamentals of memetic media. It traces the (imperfect) connections between conceptualizations of memes as cultural replicators and the mediated texts that have come to bear the name in pop cultural parlance. It then outlines five fundamental logics central to memetic participation. Memetic media are unique for their multimodality (their expression in multiple modes of communication), reappropriation (their “poaching” of existing texts), resonance (their connections to individual participants), collectivism (their social creation and transformation), and spread (their circulation through mass networks). These logics persist beyond individual texts, and are lynchpins for public conversations occurring across mediated contexts.

Beginning with the story of the advent of online crowdfunding, this chapter shows how audiences organized into participatory fandoms during the twentieth century. It defines fandom and shows its tensions between anticapitalism and consumerism. It traces the evolution of online fandom, beginning with BBSs and mailing lists through to the World Wide Web. The progression is illustrated in part through the author’s experiences as a young fan before the internet and as an older able to take advantage of online resources. It closes with the argument that by the time artists came to the internet with hopes of marketing their music, fans had already set the terms of engagement with the gift cultures they had established online.

Participatory cultures attempt to lift citizens out of individual isolation to engage them in processes of communal exchange, creating forms of sociality that enable new forms of the political to emerge. However, this simultaneously enables new strategic forces of commodification and coercion. The question here seems to be how to retain the clear emancipatory potential that can be found in these expanded practices of participatory culture without falling prone to the new powerful strategic forms of coercion, particularly in the online domain. This chapter examines three art initiatives that offer important insights into how this complex negotiation might be achieved: the art collectives Furtherfield from London and Not An Alternative from Brooklyn, and the participatory theater project “Days of the Commune,” staged in the context of Occupy Wall Street. What these three initiatives share is a critical understanding and deep rootedness in both local offline cultures and translocal online cultures.

This chapter focuses on the complex multimodal reappropriation at the heart of memetic media, outlining the socially-situated grammar that connects participants as they employ memetic media in their conversations. This grammar is premised on bricolage and poaching, on participants “making do” by transforming media texts they didn’t narrowly create and don’t narrowly own. It addresses the tensions between imitation and transformation in this process, arguing that the bricolage and poaching at the heart of memetic media are creative, expressive acts. As it outlines the formal and social dimensions underscoring memetic media, it builds a case for the persistent power of memetic logics as a lingua franca for public conversation.

This chapter focuses on the productive and affective priorities of technological activism. It describes a pedagogical workshop the activists held over a weekend—the barnraising ethos in miniature, with attendant advantages and difficulties for activists, novices, and expert participants. It draws out some of the dynamics surrounding expertise that vexed the activists as they tried to realize a political vision that called for equality. It shows that one consequence of promoting technology as a platform for emancipatory politics is that this can result in a constant battle with unequally distributed expertise.

This chapter makes the case for what and how we should teach about media in K-12 schools and universities. The author takes a measured approach, advocating the teaching of both traditional media criticism as well as Web 2.0 skills related to content creation and participation. Further, Buckingham urges educators to resist what he calls “techno-fetishism,” or celebrating technology in education for its own sake. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that educators who do not participate in new media culture risk losing the so-called “right to teach” by living in a different society than that of their students.

This chapter focuses on the everyday antagonisms that are perpetuated through memetic participation, specifically regarding race and gender identities. However, it also argues that memetic participation can be employed for the counterpublic contestation of those same antagonisms. The memetic logics, grammar, and vernacular introduced in the first half of the book are tools employed for both silencing marginalization and vocal pushback of that marginalization. The nature of this counterpublic engagement is ambivalent though, given that memetic media are often fraught with ambiguous irony and ambivalent humor. Genuine antagonisms and marginalizations can thrive under the “just joking” frame. But—even in the midst of this ambivalent system—there is value to the agonistic counterpublic engagement occurring through memetic media. Voice exists, even in the midst of the tensions evident throughout this discussion.

Chapter 1 introduces the field of Indian cinema, its public culture characterized by diversity and the diversity of its audiences. It also introduces Bangalore city, the field setting for the study. The chapter argues that Indian cinema and filmgoing culture as a non-European cinematic tradition provides a strategic site for a 'field-view' and in-depth ethnography that can address much of what has been overlooked in film studies. Where cinema exists as spectacle and cultural performance and draws on the aesthetics of festival, ethnographic study shows that purely filmic or textual analysis misses the complexities of cinema on the ground. The chapter critiques the Eurocentrism of film studies, describes the difficulties of conducting audience research and the challenges of ethnographic fieldwork as it calls for understandings of cinema and its experience that are grounded in the immediate contexts and institutional settings as well as the broader participatory culture in which cinema exists, is made and recast. It proposes new analytical approaches that are located in cinema’s social world and in settings in which films are made, appropriated and elaborated.