How have mobile medias shaped participatory culture?

Due to the easy access of wireless and 3G enabled mobile medias, participating online whilst on the move has become more and more popular. This in turn has increased the amount of users becoming youth producers who get the chance to create and change their own section of the internet through Web 2.0.

As social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become so popular, mobile medias give the public the opportunity to access them whenever and wherever they go. Most modern mobile phones have built in cameras which give the user the chance to take pictures and upload them easily onto these sites. It can be argued that each individuals page on a social networking site represents that person and their identity and mobile medias give a person the chance to take pictures to characterise themselves for these websites. Hills, M. (2009:p.119) says that Facebook photographs are ‘recorded via mobile devices precisely in order to be shared online as a marker of one’s cultural taste’ . This suggests that every time someone takes a picture through their mobile, it's for a social network in mind as ‘the self is constantly and narcissistically performed, auto-objectified, for an imagined audience’.

Henry Jenkins said that as a part of participatory culture, there is strong support for creating and sharing ones projects and that there is a general belief that contributors matter. Because of this, an increasingly large amount people are becoming active social agents. An example of a strongly supported part of participatory culture was ‘Life in a Day’. People were asked to film a day of their life, through a mobile media, for a project. Through motivations like this, filming and recording through mobile devices have made people more creative, giving them the opportunity to be a part of something like a film or the internet through these medias.

Creeber and Martin. (2009) Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media. Maidenhead, Oxford University Press.

Facebook (2012) Facebook. [Online] Available from: http://www.facebook.com/ [Accessed 17th March 2012].

Twitter (2012) Twitter. [Online] Available from: https://twitter.com/ [Accessed 17th March 2012].