Trebor Scholz.
Assistant professor: SUNY at Buffalo. New York.
German/USA Media Artist
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The Participatory Turn in Sociable Web Media
About the Research
Title:
The Participatory Turn in Sociable Web Media
The proposed research argues for a participatory turn in the use of
emerging alternative web media in the digital commons. Participation
in web-based environments is not automatic. Very little research has
been carried out to discover the motivations for online collaboration.
The study will investigate online participation in the fields of 1)
political media activism, 2) conference organization, 3) networked
cultural production, and 4) media education.With a geographic focus
on the United States, the concentration on these areas is new because
current research almost exclusively caters to the optimization of
corporate efficiency. The field of media education is as understudied
as that of alternative social web media. The author chose the mentioned
four areas because they are domains in which cooperation-enhancing
tools enable alternative economies2. The outlined research will argue
that there are new, web-based, collaborative environments that can
perhaps function as model for the rethinking of offline civic participation,
which is on the decline according to sociologists such as Robert Putnam3.
This paper suggests that there is a participatory turn in online behavior.
Browsing “net publics” become content providers. They
use, customize, author, and contribute web-based materials. The paper
concludes with a reflection on the future of alternative social web
media threatened by plans for a multi-tiered or centrally controlled
Internet in which open protocols are taken over by corporate enclosures
as well as access and digital rights management. The author examines
the outlined terrain by combining a literature review with examples
and in-depth case studies as well as his own reflections and analysis.
About the Researcher
Trebor Scholz grew up in East Berlin and is currently based in New
York where he works both collaboratively and individually as an artist,
media theorist, activist, and organizer. His interests focus on media
theory, art and education. more
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