My entry on “Participation” has been published in Imagining the Internet(s): A Collaborative Glossary, edited by Nathalie Fridzema and Anya Shchetvina and published by the Institute of Network Cultures.
The glossary brings together 28 short entries from scholars working across Science and Technology Studies, media studies, communication studies, and internet history. As the editors explain, it is “not a dictionary or an encyclopaedia”: the entries are arguments, provocations, and introductions to concepts that can help us understand how the internet has historically been imagined (and how it might be imagined in future).
Entries include “the feed”, “infrastructural ideologies”, “standards”, “skeuomorphism”, “metaphor”, “algorithmic folklore”, “romanticism”, “failure”, and “futuring”. My colleague at FASoS Sally Wyatt has contributed an excellent entry on “Prefix”, which may have convinced me to launch a “cyber-blog” (or cybernetic weblog).
My own entry traces the idea of participation from Aristotle and Rousseau, through twentieth-century cybernetics and Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”, to Web 2.0 and social media. The basic question is whether participation allows people to govern something collectively, or merely provides feedback through which a system can govern them.
I’m very happy to be included alongside wonderful scholars, including Sally and web historian Anne Helmond, with whom I also helped organise a workshop at this year’s Tensions of Europe Summer School.
The glossary is free to download from the Institute of Network Cultures.