Reflections from Week 6

For my non-academic minded readers, as always, feel free to skip this post.

Dr. Bolger continued to lay out different aspects of contemporary culture—sharing culture, remix culture, and collaborative culture—and as always it was very interesting.

Sharing culture is most noticeably seen on blogs and Facebook pages.  The hallmark of sharing culture is that traditional gatekeepers of knowledge no longer have control.  For instance, political blogs started by truly average people are often more popular than the ideas professional politicians and professors.  In essence, blogs and Facebook pages are the new way to launch grassroots movements.

To understand Remix culture it will be helpful to first give a brief history of entertainment culture in the U.S.  Until the 1850’s people were entertained in their own homes by their neighbors and relatives singing, playing the piano, or telling stories—all entertainment was local and personal.  In the 1850’s there started to be regional traveling road shows that offered slightly better entertainment than one’s friends could provide.  In the 1920’s recorded music and movies dominated the traveling road shows because once again the quality of entertainment was higher.  This change meant that entertainment went from being regional to national.  However, because of a variety of technologies that came into being at the end of the 20^th century, production costs of media plummeted greatly once again allowing for local entertainment.  This can be seen most notably in millions of Utube videos that will only be viewed by ten people.

Remix culture, however, is not about being original but rather about combining different forms of media.  So a video might have a popular song playing in the background or be a spoof on a popular scene from a movie.  The significance of remix culture is that once again entertainment can happen at a local level.

Collaborative culture is seen most noticeably in Wikipedia.  In essence people want to, and are willing to, create things as a group without much supervision.  An interesting feature of this culture is that almost everyone has some small piece of unique knowledge to share.

Dr. Bolger fits all of this into participatory culture.  An interesting aspect of this culture is that it is a “fan” culture.  By this Dr. Bolger means that for no pay people are willing to give their time and energy to do the things they love—for instance make a Utube video or write a blog.

Another interesting piece of participatory culture is that sociologist have discovered that to assimilate the values of a particular sub-culture one must spend between 6-10 hours a week participating in that group.  For instance, for people who spend less that six hours in a faith community they divorce at the same rate as the rest of culture.  For those who spend more than six the rate drops dramatically.