On Participation

The recent 'digital turn' - the process of passing from an analogue mode of cultural production to a digital one - has prompted many scholars to assert a variety of paradigm shifts within the academic field of Media Studies. As traditional notions of media producers, users and consumers begin to blur some have described digital technological practices as deeply democratic. By merely celebrating the interactive features of 'new media' many new approaches fail to offer critical insight into the historical development of the contemporary socio-technological milieu and largely ignore how participatory cultures are targeted by innovative political-economic regimes. I present a critique of recent work which, for the sake of this thesis and popular reference, I label Media Studies 2.0. This is a theoretical dissertation that aims to contribute to the wider debates within media theory; not through an abstract model, but through clarifying the particular issues which have contributed to the development of new media technologies and their social character.