About participatory culture and where to find it

Edition no 9. Date: 16 June 2026
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Aristotle, in his Politics(1), said that “man is by nature a social animal” and that “society is something that precedes the individual”. Some translate this quote as “man is by nature a political animal” and others as “social animal”. I see both translations as true. We are social entities, and at the same time, every social gathering is a political one. Because when we work towards creating social spaces, they will be based on cultural, economic, and political affinities. We like to be and interact with like-minded people, in online and offline setups.
When these gatherings start to consolidate and experiment with different ways to work, play, or learn, they will start to create a culture, a participatory culture.

Maybe others know it as prosumers, or collaborative, but the participatory culture, as a concept, is a cultural environment where the participants in the discourse are not only consumers, but also contributors and producers.
Henry Jenkins, an American media professor, is the one who popularised the term at the beginning of the 2000s, and he defined participatory culture as one that:

• has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement;

• has strong support for creating and sharing personal creations;

• has an informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.
  Also, in a participatory culture, members feel some degree of social connection and believe their contribution matters.

To put it in simpler terms, a community built with a participatory culture (intentionally or not) is easy to access and express, is inclusive and supportive, and has some kind of system where the rules are explained.

Examples of participatory culture communities

How participatory culture manifests is not always constrained by its medium, class hierarchies, or geographical barriers. It can happen in real-life settings like the work gatherings in 19th century Transylvania, or the early Star Trek zine collectives. It can be in faith-based communities and volunteer groups.

In online setups, the culture can look like the solarpunk communities that gather in digital spaces to share DIY methods to become more resilient and independent. It can also look like the cyberdeck communities where women build DIY computers as a counter-manifestation of the mainstream BigTech male technological culture.

The nostalgia over blogs, forums, and the early internet, which you find on mainstream platforms (check Threads to see the performative posts), is in fact nostalgia for a culture of participation that worked.

Look at Twitter: it was the place where academics would post threads full of information and engage in discussions. It was also the digital place where you could follow, in real-life, a conference, a sporting event, and where most of the breaking news was happening. Twitter was the place where you could ask a question with a hashtag, and strangers would answer. Now, after the Musk acquisition, Twitter has changed: it’s called X, the algorithm pushes a lot of brain rot, polarising content, and AI slop. But the most important thing is that the people who participated in the discourse have changed.
Minorities, marginalised communities, and left-leaning (left in the European context and acceptance) people have stopped engaging in the platform.

The users of Tumblr are one of the most resilient groups to change. They kept the vibe of the culture despite repeated acquisitions (from Yahoo, Verizon, and now Automattic), adult content ban, and an array of features launched by the company, which ended up being discontinued fairly quickly.
One interesting element of Tumblr culture is the commentary tags. These are tags used to convey a message, be it cultural, political, or societal, in relation to the content artefact they are connected to. A Tumblr tag can have spaces and special characters and can be up to 140 characters long, so most of the time these tags have a life of their own.

The other BigTech platforms, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, have seen their own version of these changes.

Another example of participatory culture is the fandom. Think the Beatles fans, the science fiction fans, anime and manga fandom, the Swifties, and others. Most of us are part of a fandom, even if we’re not active is a defined community space.

When the members work together, they can save TV Series, like The Expanse, or the effort to map a possible feature list at the invitation of the creator of Pinboard, the bookmarking website. After a 2011 tweet asking about a list of features to implement, the fandom created a collaborative document of over 50 pages. In it, you can see how every idea was discussed, voted, edited and organised by people who didn’t know each other in real life, but had a connection with the fandom and its needs.

I cannot discuss about fandom and participatory culture without mentioning AO3- Archive of Our Own. Started as a reaction to the LiveJournal being sold to a Russian company, and other platforms' censorship, Archive of Our Own has become the largest repository of fan fiction, with an active community, broadest access and a robust tagging system. Through their nonprofit, they have projects focused on the legal protection of the fan works, on the preservation of at-risk fannish projects and a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Currently reading

• Reading Pope Leo XIV's encyclical letter “Magnifica Humanitas. On Safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence”. A good intro analysis you can listen on this podcast episode from The Rest is Politics.

• I’m reading the “Machine, organism, and language: a comparative epistemology of AI models” by Matteo Pasquinelli, published in the “AI & Society” journal. In it, the author proposes a comparative analysis of three central paradigms of modern science: language, organism, and machine, in the current context of AI. He shifts the focus from the organism-machine of early modernity to the language-machine analogy of late modernity. To quote him: “Language, understood as labour and more precisely as the abstraction of the social division of labour, constitutes the fabric of the machine. Language, however, far from being merely a formalisable and automatable system, remains the space of collective and political agency: one cannot miss, in the mid-2020s, the politicisation of LLMs for ideological propaganda and cultural hegemony.” The article is open-access.

Recommendations

• The European Commission has published the European technological sovereignty package, a set of legislative measures to increase EU capacity in cloud, AI, semiconductors and open source. More on the Forkable website.

• World Inequality Lab report on how not to set the world on fire by 2100 via The Guardian

• A list of fictional brands and companies found in films, games and TV series. Thanks, Janne, for the recommendations.

• A chamber jazz album by Mette Henriette, recorded at the Munch Museum in Oslo and produced by ECM founder Manfred Eicher. Characterised by the music critics as intimate, soft, and unbounded by time. Listen and order on the ECM Records website.

• “Have you seen my bird?” is a 5-day animation jam via Gobelins.

Let’s work together

When I can help you or your team, get in touch here. I do:

• Information and content architecture: Audit and solve problems for websites, communities and services, and design solutions and processes that work for the long term.

• Training and workshops: presentations, hands-on workshops, one-on-one mentoring in information architecture, knowledge management, marketing strategy and community design.

• Free (!) coffee consultations: I keep 2 hours a week in my calendar free for people I don’t work with, to talk about their most important topics.

1. Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing Company, 1998, 1253a.

2. Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Internet Archive / The Getty