Participation Culture But At Least We Are Participating?

Hey everybody,

This week after watching the  An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube video, I had a lot to think about and mull over. I will start by admitting that I am one of those people that use YouTube as basically their main social media source, entertainment source, and educational source. I’m constantly on there, if not to watch videos then usually to play LoFi to soundtrack my life. I was always happy to just be a passive observer on YouTube, but since having my son and seeing his relationship with YouTube, I understand more the desire to participate. I asked my son why he likes YouTube so much more than traditional forms of shows like things on Netflix, and his response was simple and insightful “because I get to see things I can actually do”.

I think that participation culture sometimes gets dumped on because it can often be superficial, but I like the idea of getting people (especially young people) excited about participating. If teachers and schools can somehow harness that desire to participate, they can direct it to achieve all kinds of positive goals.

There was a quote from the An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube video that said “media mediate human relations… when media change then human relationships change“. This made me think that we as educators should try to lean into this use of media (especially video media like YouTube) to participate in our society. We could be teaching things like how to make pervasive, well made videos for students to share, and teaching them how they could use these videos and to affect change in their worlds. We could even be teaching students how to effectively run their own video streams or podcasts. If this is how we are going to be a large part of how our students (and us) communicate with each other going forward, then teaching how to communicate effectively in this way should be part of our jobs  as teachers, almost like how I was taught to write a formal letter as a child.  The media has changed, so we must change with it to continue to have those important human relationships with our students.

Cheers!

Jerome