The Media's New Participatory Nature

In Dana Boyd’s book, Csikszentmihalyi, he argues that people are happiest when they can reach a state of "flow." For the last few centuries, we have been living in an era of broadcast media. Most recently, however, we have been switching to an era of networked media. We as a society have changed this “flow”. We now use social networking as a means of obtaining and distributing information. Henry Jenkins states in a study that more than half of American teens online have produced media content and about a third have circulated media that they have produced beyond their immediate friends and family. Those who are most enamored with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in-tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate. As our information ecosystem evolves, we will see some radical changes take place. Boyd states that if we are going to try to get in-flow with information, we need to understand how information flows differently today. He breaks it down into four challenges where technological hope and reality collide (Democratization, Stimulation, Homophily, and Power). Jenkins states these issues can not be understood through a simple opposition between digital natives and digital immigrants, but rather require us to dig deeper into the diverse range of experiences young people have online and the range of different interactions between adults and teens in these new participatory culture. Overall, as we continue to move from a broadcast model of information to a networked one, we will continue to see re-workings of the information landscape, thus changing how our media will be handled in the future.