ABSTRACT
Radio, along with television and other 'old media' platforms, is making increasing use of audience participation as a source of value. The valuable contribution of social media audiences is ever more that of singling out pieces of content that are valued differently from others. This chapter provides today audience valuations, rather than content creation, valuable aspect of participation. Indeed, cultural 'participation' used to be considered quite differently. Within media studies, the emphasis on popular participation in the creation of cultural meanings developed chiefly within the postwar cultural studies tradition. Through the study of working-class traditions, subcultures, audience activity and consumer reflexivity, the cultural studies tradition emphasised how ordinary people carve out a space for subjectivity and resistance through everyday reflexive appropriation of consumer goods and mass cultural products. Most of the critiques of contemporary participatory culture focused on content creation, casting audience members in the mold of Marx's industrial workers who are exploited as their productive labour are insufficiently remunerated.
