Jenkins, H (2014) "Rethinking 'Rethinking Convergence/Culture'", Cultural Studies, Vol 28, No. 2, pp. 267 - 274
It is suggested that there are four phases to participatory culture - emergence (1985-1993), waking up to the web (1994-98), push button publishing (1999-2004) and ubiquitous connections (2005-2011). I find it weird that during my life time, most of this has taken place. I am so used to using the internet, my phone or a computer for catching up with friends, researching for my studies, creating work, etc, that I forget that all of this is relatively new and that it hasn't always been around. I sometimes wonder how my parents or people of a previous generation coped without this; but, then again, this type of technology wasn't even around and they didn't know it existed, so had to get by without it.
Most people of my age expect their parents or grandparents to not know a thing about this new generation of technology and usually this is right. I am quite lucky that my mother and I are on exactly the same wavelength and know just as much as one another; I'd say that my mum could even be more savvy with this than me, I guess! As well as this, my grandparents use Facebook, in particular my Nana and she probably catches up with her friends more than myself on it! I'm not sure if this is because my mum and Nana are younger than most people of my age's grandparents and that they are able to grasp the concept and are not stuck in their ways like many people who might be in their 70s/80s/90s.
I also found it interesting that people can collaborate with other people without even meeting/knowing one another using participatory culture. An example of this is 'Blind Side of a Secret' made in 2007, by Thomas Swiss, Yoshi Sodeoka, Nils Muhlenbruch and Motomichi Nakamura; they all worked together using the internet to create a professional piece of artwork which was also published using the world wide web.
In the current day, it is considered 'normal' to use the internet for education and it is accepted in schools and universities as a way of learning. Education industries highly recommend that people use this as a platform and that we strive off it. It is strange though, how most of us rely on it for our studies... an example being myself using this site to create a blog for my university course. In previous years, people were probably asked to write a diary, however, a blogging website makes is so much easier to quickly express your thoughts and immediately share it with your tutor, your friends/classmates and the rest of the world.
In the modern society, I guess that the internet has become a part of who we are. It's normal to use words like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc; these are considered as words as well as company names. But, with these sites, there also comes a downfall; hacking is relatively common, as well as viruses and people's private lives being shared unnecessarily. What I am probably trying to say is that people have got way too clever and have found new ways of hurting people with an easy way of covering their trace.
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