Anonymous, 4chan, Harry Potter Alliance, Kony 2012, Facebook, Instagram, Minecraft. In the twenty years since Henry Jenkins first began talking about what he termed “participatory culture,” the concept – and the term itself – has gained wide traction across a range of disciplines as scholars have sought to respond both to new cultural practices and to the new affordances enabled by digital, networked, and mobile technologies. And, not surprisingly, participatory culture as a concept has also come under sharp criticism and even attack from some quarters. The goal of this book is to critically examine the concept of “participatory culture,” tracing the ways our own thinking has evolved through the years in response to a changing media environment and to the shifting stakes in policy debates surrounding digital media. When the concept first emerged, no one knew what shape networked communication might take or how it would impact fields such as education or politics. After twenty years, we are in a somewhat different position, able to look back on what has changed and what has not changed as our culture has absorbed a range of new media platforms and practices. Throughout this book-long dialogue, the authors try to reconcile conflicting bids about what all of this means and where it may be going next.

The authors of this book – Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito¹, and danah boyd – came of age at different moments in the rise of participatory culture and have diverse scholarly orientations and histories. Despite our varied backgrounds, our professional pathways are intertwined because of shared concerns, commitments, and interests concerning the social and cultural implications of emerging media. We are friends and colleagues who have supported, challenged, and collaborated with each other over the years.

More concretely, all three of us participated in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. Henry and his New Media Literacies team at MIT (Jenkins et al. 2007) developed a white paper that used the concept of participatory culture to describe the core social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire in order to participate meaningfully in the new media landscape. Alongside Peter Lyman and Michael Carter, Mimi led a large-scale ethnographic study on youth, new media, and learning as part of this initiative; danah was brought in as one of the core graduate researchers on that study. Henry’s New Media Literacy project and Mimi and danah’s Digital Youth project were the first two major grants by MacArthur in what became the focus of the foundation’s educational grant-making. Mimi and Henry have both served as participants in a MacArthur-funded research network focused on Youth and Participatory Politics, danah has worked with MacArthur on more policy-oriented research, and all three of us have worked together to help organize Digital Media and Learning conferences and mentorship programs.

The book reflects this history of working at the intersection of youth practices, participatory culture, and digital and networked technology. In addition to being the focus of our scholarly work, we believe this constellation of topics is timely and relevant as we navigate an important shift in our media and communications environs. The focus on the relationship between participatory culture and digital and networked technology reflects the historical moment in which we write this book – as ideas around participation, crowdsourcing, peer production, and Web 2.0 are moving from geek culture to a more globalized mainstream. Young people remain a central focus of our research, in part because youth have been lead adopters of mobile, social, and gaming media. We see youth as uniquely positioned to effect social change, while also recognizing the conditions of oppression that they face in making their perspectives heard and appreciated. Our focus on the context of the US also deserves mention. While all of us have done international work, most notably Mimi in Japan, the center of gravity for our research has been in the US, and the book reflects this. Our discussions of US teens and the California tech scene no doubt reflect a degree of parochialism, but we hope these examples will have broader relevant readers outside of the US as well. We encourage scholars elsewhere to ask themselves similar questions about how these changes may be taking shape in their culturally specific contexts.

Each chapter in this book represents a shared topic of concern and begins with an introductory essay by one of the three authors, followed by a conversation between the three of us. Throughout, we weave together our personal experiences, perspectives, and research with a broader analysis of the issues at stake.

The first chapter, “Defining Participatory Culture,” introduces the core concept framing this book. We then move, in “Youth Culture, Youth Practices,” to a discussion of youth as a unique population that we have all studied in depth. From there, in “Gaps and Genres in Participation,” we consider the diversity in forms of participation as it relates to issues of equity. These three chapters lay out the conceptual and topical terrain. There follow three chapters that delve more deeply into issues of concern and our investments as engaged public intellectuals. “Learning and Literacy” explores the implications of participatory culture for education and media literacy. “Commercial Culture” considers the complex dynamics between capitalism, popular culture, and today’s networked media ecosystem. Finally, “Democracy, Civic Engagement, and Activism” considers the intersection between these topics and participatory and networked culture.

This book departs from scholarly convention in many ways, having come together through a dialogic and interactive process. The conversations reproduced here took place in Mimi’s house in Los Angeles – the three of us sprawling on furniture, chomping on snacks, dealing with interruptions from children and neighbors, distracted by text messages and phone calls, but, slowly and surely, working through our shared agenda together. Along the way, we reached out to our own constituencies through Twitter and blogs, seeking questions they wanted us to address, and we’ve woven them into these dialogues. Over time, thanks to Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and Dropbox, we’ve edited, reorganized, debated, and filled in gaps in the original transcripts to give more structure and clarity to our originally rather informal exchanges. Evelyn McDonnell, Quinn Norton, and Matt Rafalow provided invaluable editorial input into this process, as did our editors at Polity Press, Andrea Drugan and Joe Devanny. While every book is a collective enterprise, this one has emerged from a particularly lively participatory process.

As you read the book, you will quickly realize that the conversations presented here reveal the ways in which the three of us, all deeply engaged in these issues, still struggle with many aspects of participatory culture. There are places where we disagree with each other and topics where we struggle analytically and intellectually. Unlike a typical scholarly manuscript, this book is about our willingness to reveal the limitations of our knowledge and our collective struggles to work out what we’re privileged enough to witness. Research is a process, and all too often we tend to emphasize the final output. As scholars committed to participatory culture, we’re also committed to opening up our practice and thinking. This book is our attempt to do just that. Enjoy!