The Culture Industry and Participatory Audiences

This project offers a new critique of participatory media practices. While the concept of participatory culture is often theorised as embodying the possibility of a potentially utopian future of media engagement and participation, this book argues that the culture industry, as it adapts and changes, provides moments of authorised participation that play out under the dominance of the industry. Through a critical recounting of the experience of creating a web series in Australia (with a global audience) outside of the culture industry structures, this book argues< that whilst participatory culture employing convergent media technologies enables media consumers to become media producers, this takes place through platforms controlled by industry. The emerging architecture of the Internet has created a series of platforms whereparticipation can take place. It is these platforms that become spaces of controlled access to participatory cultural practices.

Offers comprehensive and sophisticated argument that expands and critiques discussions of audience participation in digital media and audience labour in the digital age Provides a framework for understanding emerging cultural practices and media engagement Brings an understanding the work of the Frankfurt School in the digital age Demonstrates how critical theory can be used to explore contemporary issues of audience and the culture industry

Autorentext

Emma Keltie is a research officer at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. She managed the Engaging Creativity through Technologies project as part of the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre, and prior to joining Western Sydney University worked as a lecturer in communication and cultural theory. Her research interests include participatory culture, the role of technology in the mental health and well-being of young people, digital storytelling, and media convergence.

Klappentext
This work offers a discussion of participatory culture as a disruption to the previously held dominance of the culture industry, while also exploring the tensions created in this emerging media landscape through analysis and examination of the current Australian media policy, regulation, and content distribution landscape. The text argues that the culture industry colonises participatory cultural practices and absorbs them into the practices of the industry, to reveal that what emerges from this colonisation is an audience that misrecognises their agency as participants in the production of culture. The discourse surrounding participatory culture positions the audience as active in cultural production and falsely emancipates them as consumers, with little acknowledgement of the exploitation of labour that is occurring. Keltie exposes how, as the culture industry folds participatory practices back into its own industry practices, audience participation, in effect, becomes authorised bythe culture industry.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. The Culture Industry and Audience Agency.- 3. Agency in Practice: A Participatory Utopia.- 4. Fans: A Long History of Participation.- 5. Producing Culture: Australian Media and Creative Policy.- 6. Participation in Practice.- 7. Authorised Participation.-