The Internet & Participation Culture

In this week’s lecture, we discussed this idea of a “new culture of participation” that has emerged and grown as the internet has emerged and grown.  This culture of participation, to put it simply, basically means this: in today’s world, people do not just watch and consume media, they are active participants in it, and this active participation is only growing.  In the anthropological introduction to YouTube video, posted by Michael Wesch in 2008, he mentions that there are 9232 hours of footage uploaded to YouTube every day.  According to Statista, as of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute which equates to approximately 30,000 hours of uploaded content per hour.  In the TELUS | Dark Cloud: the high cost of cyberbullying documentary, it is mentioned that in 2016 there were 2.5 billion smartphone users and by 2020, that number had grown to 3.5 billion.  Clearly, this new culture of participation is growing at a rapid rate, and there are many benefits to this new culture, but there are also some challenges that we teachers need to be aware of.

Here is a short video discussing participatory culture:

“60% of Canadian youth report seeing cyberbullying or online abusive behaviour within the last four weeks.” This statistic comes from Statistics Canada and was featured in the TELUS | Dark Cloud: the high cost of cyberbullying documentary.  When I first saw this statistic, I was shocked; I knew cyberbullying existed but I had no idea that it existed to this scale.  Unfortunately, I believe that this number would have grown in 2021 due to the pandemic moving most activities to the web.  In 2021, kids were forced to be online more than they ever have, and if one was a victim of cyberbullying, there would have been no escape.  Watching the Amanda Todd documentaries, one can see just how devastating cyberbullying can be.  In the Dark Cloud documentary, they discuss the impacts cyberbullying can have on the developing brain.  Looking at scans of teen brains that had been victims of cyberbullying, they found that their brains shared similarities to the brains of people who suffer from Post-traumatic stress disorder.  Contrary to what a lot of adults think, the evidence is there that bullying and cyberbullying can have long-lasting impacts on kids.  Bullying and cyberbullying, in my opinion, is one of the biggest issues regarding children and teens today, and it needs to be addressed.

But, this new “participation culture” is not all bad.  People are connecting in ways that would not even be imaginable a few decades ago. This quote by Michael Wesch sums this new world up perfectly. “The web is not just about information. It actually about linking people, and it’s about linking people in ways that we’ve never been linked before, and in a way that we cannot even predict.” Our world is changing because of this participation culture, and there are great effects because of it. People are interacting and connecting with each other in ways they never have before.  There are groups for all interests/hobbies all over the internet where like-minded people can come together and share their ideas and create.  As teachers, we have the duty to highlight the positives of this new culture, while educating and warning about the negatives. I believe proper education is key to fighting against the negatives of this participatory culture.  We need to educate students on digital literacy, and not just high school students. Kids today are connected to the internet before they even start elementary school, so this learning needs to happen as early as kindergarten and grade 1. With proper education, I feel the positives can heavily outweigh the negatives regarding this new participatory culture.