An Alternate Form of Social Media and Participatory Culture
Let me preface this blog post by stating that I have a low presence on social media as we most often think about it, that is using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Reading the material on Participatory Culture, therefor, made me question whether I am participating at all. Participatory Culture, as I read it, is the cultural practices we engage through social media. It is one that enables active and meaningful engagement creating and disseminating artifacts through communication and collaboration using social media as a tool to do it. By this rudimentary definition, I am not participating, which, frankly is a sad thought to contemplate.
Then I rethought and reassessed my assumptions on my participation. While I may not be large-scale participating like I would if I were to create artwork and share it, if I were to write a short story and publish it, become part of a social or political movement, by virtue of playing a massive multiplayer online game I am participating. While reading Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century I was struck a number of items that helped me reorient my thinking. The first came when reading that Participatory Culture allows people to feel a part of a community, specifically, for me, affiliations which is defined as “memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media.”
I play in an alliance of 65 people with varying levels of intimacy, from alliance member, to friend group, to close friends and found family. Additionally, we all communicate both in game and in outside chats both group and individual. While researching for a paper on MMOs and the development of found family I came across a chapter the book Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds: An Interdisciplinary Perspective written by Fanny Anne Ramirez, which succinctly describes the significance of chats like I indicated above. Specifically that “multilayered [structures] of engagement…[creating] a community that not only lives in-game, but also has significant substance outside of it.”
I also came across a somewhat startling, yet wholly unsurprising statistic, at least to those of us that play them with any regularity: that in external game chats communications of a socioemotional nature, such as meme and joke sharing, concern for others being expressed and celebrating good news, are more than three times more likely to happen than other forms of communication. It is chats like these that create a “shared sense of space, practice and identity” (Ramirez, F).
It is from these that I found an echo of my involvement in the excerpt from Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, namely the skills of:
Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
I find that many of these skills are not only extremely important to gameplay, but are particularly important when playing in an international alliance like I do. My alliance is majority Chinese with some Brazilians, some Koreans, some Americans and various others. I can remember learning not to call World Chat WC because it’s an abbreviation for bathroom in many countries, learning that China gives a generous amount of time off to its citizens for Chinese New Year and some rather creative ways to swear in Brazilian Portuguese.
Additionally, I take on many different roles within the alliance and also without. I am the little sister, the supportive friend/mother, the reliable Elder or Leader, the warrior and that person that can be relied upon to share the party mood. I also adapt my identity for in game and out. I can honestly say that playing my game has taught me many skills that I use outside of game. I can organize in detail, manage people, reach out to others without shame and adapt to different cultural expectations.
Considering all of this, I feel that MMO gameplay is, in fact, participation as defined in Participatory Culture. I feel validated that I am a part of something larger than myself and also something worthwhile. It’s easy for me to feel somewhat like a hermit and cut off from the social trends that are happening on many platforms. It is also easy for me to feel that this is a bad thing instead of thinking of it as being selective and with it fitting in with my privacy concerns and preferences. I am leaving this blog post feeling clarity I didn’t have before and feeling better about myself and my engagement with the world.
