By Teresa A. Martin
As frequent readers know, words sometimes pass through my world with great frequency and I’ve learned to pay attention to them as they do. In the past two weeks “participatory” has been showing up with noticeable repetition.
Participatory democracy. Participatory media. Participation. The notion of being part of something in an active way is pretty much bopping me upside of the head.
And as it does, I realize that there is a strong technology theme tying it together. One of the key ways that technology is changing our world is that it is removing the barriers to participation at all levels.
The greatest shift that the online evolution has brought is the ability to participate – to not only consume information or be on the receiving end of an interaction but also to create it, respond to it, and interact back with it.
Television, the last evolution of information and communication, was a consumption technology. Barriers to creating it were high, the ability to distribute it was limited, the structure of it was one-way only. The world of TV, single-rider cars on interstates, and a cultural focus on a mythical nuclear family created a society that, over the past 50 years, trained us to consume, not to participate.
As 20th century transportation and information technologies emerged, they pushed us away from a centralized geography of living where two-way interaction was inevitable and participation happened simply by proximity. By and large, we began believe that one voice didn’t matter or wasn’t heard. That there was no way to respond. That participation was for someone else, someone with skills or access we didn’t have. Our culture shifted away from its participatory roots and into something more passive and insular.
The pendulum swung far to one side. We are now seeing the return swing back.
The scariest thing about the Internet is that it is so darn easy to be part of something. It doesn’t take much to say what you think and to share what you think with a million others. It doesn’t much to join a political action or to sign a petition or to lodge a complaint.
This scares people on the receiving end. I remember when email addresses were first published in newspapers. An awful lot of reporters at the places I was affiliated with were, well, horrified. Readers could talk back directly! How awful was that! Others of us thought it was pretty cool and liked hearing feedback, although we’d sometimes talk about how we didn’t have time to respond and wondered where the interaction line should be and how that changed our roles.
The rise in online political actions, like MoveOn, scares some people too. There is a certain discomfort known that opposing views are gathering to share coffee and chat with like mind or to have a flash mob appear to chant a slogan at an event with seemingly no warning.
It scares entrenched business interests. Does the recording industry like it that a band can post its own songs online and distribute them to fan without a middleman, and that band and fans can have two-way interaction? Does the video programming industry like Utube and self-posted works? Do retails like the new level of participation comparative shopping has taken?
But none of that matters. The information technology of the 21st century is finding ways to push people back together, to draw them from all corners of the globe, to create participation once again simply by being there.
This openness leads to another emerging need. Now we have to learn about meaningful participation. Just screaming “I am here’ is not enough. We have to use the same tools to learn and think before we speak, to use them as means to not only participate, but to participate with power.
That is a subtle but profound difference.
A recent New York Times editorial from David Pogue bemoaned the lack of civility online. He said that manners didn’t matter and we were seeing a generation that didn’t know how to interact properly. I don’t think it is so much a lack of civility but a relearning of lessons once known.
In creating the consumer culture of the past half-decade, our world lost the ability to understand how to participate effectively in any two-way interchange. As we start to participate again, it is going to be bumpy and often ugly, like the way a child scribbles before he or she draws or write in beautiful script. But I’d be more frightened if the opportunity was there and no one was taking it. We are scribbling, but from those scribbles some good things will arise.
Participating isn’t always pretty, it doesn’t always make a difference, it isn’t comfortable from either side, and it isn’t as easy as it seems. But it is far more true to our natures than the passivity that has marked us previously and should give us all a little flicker of hope as we look ahead to the dawning of the seventh year of the century.
Become a Member
