Until recently, the systems and media available for published self-expression have been reserved for professionals like writers and broadcasters. This chasm between the average person and the professional existed because of the significant costs involved with production and distribution. In the past several years, personal technology has enabled non-professional individuals to begin to bypass traditional outlets and to make their own self-declarations — the third example of participation. In the early 1990s, a few individuals...Read on

The second example of participation is group assembly. Group assembly involves ad-hoc gatherings or coordinated actions by groups of people using technology originally intended to enable one-on-one communication with known individuals (such as text messaging or conversations on mobile phones). However, when the members of adapting enterprises use these technologies, the participants in the group often do not know each other. While this alternative use of technology is not explicitly impossible or prohibited by the...Read on

In my previous post, I described the phenomenon of participatory culture and how institutions are no longer in control (see Making With People). There are several examples of how this participation manifests itself in the world, and the first examples I’d like to talk about are hard-hacking and soft-hacking. HARD-HACKING Hard-hacking is the tangible sibling to soft-hacking, which I’ll describe in a moment. Hard-hacking occurs when a person makes modifications to a physical object after...Read on