ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in issues relating to participatory media in most disciplines and fi elds in the humanities and social sciences. For example, literary, fi lm, and music scholars discuss how new modes of amateur media production and collaborative media art affect long-established concepts of creativity and originality. Communication and media researchers examine how blogs, podcasting, video-sharing websites, and other media distributed via the internet are changing the relationship between media industries and consumers. Scholars in the fi eld of cultural studies investigate the way in which fan communities reshape media content as they personalize it for their own use. Legal scholars reexamine issues of authorship and copyright law in light of practices such as digital sampling and remixing in popular culture. Sociologists and political theorists discuss the activities of online communities as an opportunity for enhancing democracy and making room for a revitalization of the public sphere. Researchers in the fi eld of science and technology studies speculate about the ways in which participatory media might constitute new sites for emergent forms of active and scientifi c citizenship. Media educators explore issues of literacy in relation to the notion of a new participatory culture. All of these discussions address fundamental issues regarding how media technologies shape and are shaped by economic, political, legal, social, and cultural institutions. However, they are all too often obscured by a “rhetoric of newness” that assumes participatory media is radical and revolutionary, something unique in history.1 But active and politically engaged uses of media are not exclusive to our times. As a matter of fact, it is fair to ask the question: Has there ever really been such a thing as a passive audience?2