Effective Mediums for Participatory Culture

I am really starting to feel like a lot of new terms I am learning for my new media class have the same meaning. After a while i felt like every word that we learned had to do with how a computer-user uses a website.

After reading Craig Bellamy’s blog, I got a bit more confused because the words he defines are all conglomerates of different words put together to have a multiple-use meaning. For example Transmedia navigation. You would think it would it meant how to search and use a website, but it means the ability to follow the flow of stories over a multitude of different news convergences.

After last weeks blog, when we were asked to define the three things needed to make a good website, this weeks reading an information take our explanations a little bit deeper.

This week, we aren’t just looking at one website, but how a user controls multiple websites. I liked the quote used from one of our readings: ” All the water-cooler speculation moved on-line” There are tons of websites with nothing but chit-chat, gossip and rumors, and it is up to the user how he/she interprets the numerous sites information.

The term participatory culture, is effectively just that. a culture in which you participate in. It is how the user participates in the on-line culture of sending information across the entire Internet. Participatory culture doesn’t just fall on the shoulders of the website.  The user has to be capable of maneuvering throughout different sites using the tools a programs accessible to gain the best possibly grasp on the information that is provided.

One of the easiest websites to use as an example for a effective medium of participatory culture is wikipedia.com. I know I keep bringing up wikipedia.com, and many college professors don’t like it as an accurate source for information, but I think that it has become, over time, and as it expanded, into the ultimate “on-line water-cooler”.

At first wikipedia.com was your typical on-line encyclopedia, but after time, more random people started to post their views on different topics, and after a while, it became a hotbed of citizen-encyclopedic information. If a person has information on an obscure topic, they can post it on wikipedia.com and it will become the main information for that topic.

The problem with wikipedia is that it is misleading. If you go there top find in depth info for a research paper, you might find info you need,, but the info is most likely not written by an accredited source. How does one know if what the author  has wrote is 100% accurate or if it is just their point of view.

I don’t think wikipedia encompasses all of participatory culture, but it is a super-sized forum of endless information provided by millions of different authors. Isn’t that what participation is?