Kelty, C. (2012) From Participation to Power. The Participatory Cultures Handbook.
Kelty starts his essay with a reflection of Gladwell's criticism on social media and the kind of networked activism that is based on adaptability and resilience instead of strategic and disciplined confrontation. Kelty raises the question if networks and hierarchies are mutually exclusive, and if they are the appropriate terms for analyzing the kind of participation that is happening today.
As Kelty points out, several terms and concepts have emerged for describing how participation has changed with networked media such as the Internet and digital media. He makes a list of terms that refer to social media, the Internet, software, fan cultures and "knowledge societies":
- peer production (Benkler, 2006)
- produsage (Bruns, 2008)
- the wisdom of crowds (Surowiecki, 2004)
- prosuemrs/prosumption (Toftler, 1980; Ritzer & Jurgeson, 2010)
- the network society (Castells, 1996, 2001)
- user-lead innovations (von Hippel, 2005)
- recursive publics (Kelty, 2008)
- Creation capitalim (Boelstorrf, 2008)
- Organizing netors (Rossister, 2006)
- Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006)
- convergence culture (Jenkinsm 2oo6)
- Networked Publics (Varnells, 2008; boyd, 2008)
Proposes viewing participation in a naturalistic light, in where we simply ask what kind of practices and organizational forms of participation are happening today. Can we talk about audience participation, participatory democracy, user-generated content, and peer production as the same thing?
He claims that participation is a pluralistic thing that is valuable: "participation is now expected to have an effect on the structures, institutions, organizations, or technologies in which one participates. Participation is no longer simply an opening up, an expansion, a liberation, it is now also a principle of improvement, and instrument of change, a creative force. It no longer threatens, but has become a resource: participation has been made valuable." (24)
Since participation is pluralistic, it is important to understand the different forms of participation. Kelty points out that is necessary to understand the concepts of hierarchy, market, network, organization, and platform.
The use of the term "platforms" reveals the "lack of words and concepts for making sense of the concrete assemblages and apparatuses that respond to this problematization of participation and organization." (Gillespie, 2010) The term platform is rhetorically allied with participation: "it raises people up, it levels the field, it structures from bellow, not from above," etc.
Organized publics are the opposite to formal organizations. Membership of these publics is "informal, termporary, and constituted primarily through attention." People can participate in different publics according to their capacity to put attention and commitment. Kelty explains that participation in a public is structured by platforms, by "forms and technologies of address and circulation." (25) He refers to Warner (2002) definition of publics as "ad hoc entities that come into existence only when addressed and exist only while they pay attention to that address." Kelty claims that organized publics are different to the "general public" because they are making choices and paying attention (the general public is a sort of virtual entity). "Anyone can join" organized publics as long as pays attention to something, and interacts with others who are also doing so. <blocquote> "organized publics become real instances of avirtual general public instantaneously: as soon as a group of individuals begins to pay attention to something, and continues so long as they interact with others who are also paying attention. This could mean watching a video online, signing up for an account, or joining protesters in the streets, etc." (27) </blocquote>
Using Twitter Inc. as an example Kelty reveals how technical capacities of a platform can compensate the absence of formal organizations of protest and participation.
