Convergence and Participatory Media
How digital media blur the line between producers and audiences, enabling participatory cultures, user-generated content, and spreadable media.
Definition
Convergence is the flow of content across multiple media platforms and the cooperation among industries and audiences this entails; participatory media are media in which users actively produce, modify, and circulate content rather than only consuming it.
Scope
This topic examines media convergence and the participatory cultures it fosters, in which audiences become active contributors and circulators of media. It covers Jenkins's convergence culture and participatory culture, the concept of 'produsage', spreadable media, and critical questions about the limits and inequalities of participation.
Core questions
- How does convergence blur the line between producers and consumers?
- What characterizes participatory culture and user-generated content?
- How does content spread through networked culture?
- What are the limits and inequalities of participation?
Key concepts
- Convergence
- Participatory culture
- Produsage
- User-generated content
- Spreadability
- Prosumer
Key theories
- Participatory culture and convergence
- Jenkins's account of a culture in which audiences actively participate in producing and circulating media, and content flows across converging platforms.
- Produsage
- Bruns's concept describing the collaborative, iterative creation of content by users who are simultaneously producers and consumers in networked environments.
- Spreadable media
- Jenkins, Ford, and Green's argument that value and meaning in networked culture arise from how audiences circulate and remix media, not just from distribution.
History
As web 2.0 and social media expanded user participation in the 2000s, Jenkins theorized convergence and participatory culture, Bruns coined 'produsage', and later work on spreadable media analyzed audience circulation. Critical scholars such as Couldry have since questioned how empowering participation really is, given platform power and inequalities.
Debates
- Empowerment versus exploitation
- Whether participatory media genuinely empower audiences or whether platforms appropriate unpaid user labor and reproduce existing inequalities of access and voice.
Key figures
- Henry Jenkins
- Axel Bruns
- Sam Ford
- Nick Couldry
Related topics
Seminal works
- jenkins2006
- bruns2008
- jenkinsford2013
- couldry2012
Frequently asked questions
- What is 'produsage'?
- Bruns's term combining production and usage, describing how networked users collaboratively and continuously create content as both producers and consumers.
- Is participatory media genuinely democratizing?
- It expands who can produce and circulate media, but critics note that platform power, unpaid labor, and unequal access complicate claims of straightforward democratization.