By Any Media Necessary. Henry Jenkins

      Adorable Care Act meme.

      For example, the Adorable Care Act was an effort to educate the public about the national healthcare policy often called “Obamacare” through the creation of memes that linked policy concerns with images of cute animals, designed to be circulated through social media platforms. In other cases (as we’ve already suggested) activist groups have sought change through different means—for example, fighting back over terms of service on Web 2.0 platforms that restrict their expressive freedom or promoting change through education (as will be discussed in relation to the “second-wave” libertarians).

      Christina Evans (2015), another member of the YPP network team, has been using the term “digital civic imagination” in a somewhat different but closely related sense—to refer to the ways that young people are (or are not) able to reconceptualize the social media practices they use in their everyday lives into tactics they might deploy as citizens. Through interviews with young people in Oakland, Chicago, and rural North Carolina, Evans found that young people often need help to translate skills they acquired in their social and recreational use of media toward political ends, and she considers what roles educators might play in that process. Our work can be understood as helping to map the trajectory from participatory culture to participatory politics.

      Making the Leap: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Politics

      Our book’s focus is not on new technologies per se, but on the possibilities (real and imagined) that we might use these tools to achieve greater political participation. Many initially acquired the skills and accessed infrastructures supporting this activism through cultural, rather than overtly political, activities that have become more widespread in the everyday experiences of American youth. To be clear, the cultural is always already (at least implicitly) political, but our focus here is on the ways that cultural practices are being deployed toward explicitly political ends. We are not walking away from decade-long debates about whether appropriation and remix practices may have political effects in terms of allowing us to reimagine gender and sexual identities in the case of slash fan fiction, allowing us a momentary escape from the control of regulatory structures (as in for example, discussions of Beatlemania in Ehrenreich et al. 1997), or inspiring struggles over intellectual property law constraints on political speech (as in the case of the Organization for Transformative Works.) Yet there have always been those who argued that such practices did not constitute “real politics,” which—in their eyes—involved mobilization, voting, petitioning, protest, and labor organizing. This book is thus taking up the challenge of mapping some of the points of contact between cultural and institutional models of politics and we are starting by charting the interplay between participatory culture and participatory politics.

      Participatory culture describes a diverse set of shared activities and social engagements, ranging from fan fiction writing and crafting to gaming, through which people collectively carve out a space for expression and learning. Describing the educational dimensions of participatory culture, Henry Jenkins et al. (2006) stress that groups involved in such activities are characterized by “relatively low” barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong social support for creating and sharing and for the development of “voice,” informal practices providing mentorship and training for would-be participants, and contributors’ sense that what they share matters. Young men and women who learned how to use their cameras recording skateboarding stunts, to mash up images to make cute cat pictures, or to edit fan videos are now turning their skills toward political speech and grassroots mobilization. These “creative activists” often speak to each other through images borrowed from commercial entertainment but remixed to communicate their own messages; they are often deploying social media platforms, sometimes in ways that challenge corporate interests; and they are forging communities through acts of media circulation.

      By Any Media Necessary responds to recent analyses by writers such as Nico Carpentier (2011), Peter Dahlgren (2011), Christopher M. Kelty (2013), and Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson (2013), who have called for more precise distinctions between different models of participation. Delwiche (2013), for example, draws strong links between the kinds of participatory democracy advocated by the counterculture of the 1960s and the forms of participatory culture that emerged in reaction to networked computing. Today’s participatory culture and politics reflects decades of struggles to gain greater control of the means of cultural production and circulation, to free the communication environment from powerful gatekeepers. Yet a range of interests have attached themselves to a rhetoric of participation, which may mask the continuation of old inequalities in how wealth and power are distributed. Kelty writes:

      “Participating” in Facebook is not the same thing as participating in a Free Software project, to say nothing of participating in the democratic governance of a state. If there are indeed different “participatory cultures” then the work of explaining their differences must be done by thinking concretely about the practices, tools, ideologies, and technologies that make them up. Participation is about power, and, no matter how “open” a platform is, participation will reach a limit circumscribing power and its distribution. (29)

      As we seek to deepen our understanding of participatory politics, we need to be more precise in describing the forms participation takes. Critics of participatory politics often see participation as simply another term for co-optation, implying that participating in a neoliberal economy only empowers corporate forces controlling the pipelines through which these new messages flow (Dean 2005). Rather, we describe participation in terms of the ability to forge a sense of collective voice and efficacy through larger networks that work together to bring about change.

      A More Participatory Culture

      Participation, as Nico Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) suggests, is a utopian ideal: “There is no end point. It will never be achieved … There will always be struggle, there will always be contestation. There will always be elitist forces trying to make things go back to the old ways” (266). Drawing from Carpentier, we see participation as an aspiration as much as it is a reality, something groups such as those we survey are striving to achieve. Carpentier (2011) makes a productive distinction between what he calls minimalist models of participation where participation is limited in scope and what he calls maximalist models that see participation as playing “a more substantial and continuous role and does not remain restricted to the ‘mere’ election of representatives” (16–17). Here, participation is understood as a matter of degree—few situations match his ideal of maximalist participation.

      While Jenkins’s original white paper (Jenkins et al. 2006) used the term “participatory culture,” we will refer to “a more participatory culture” to call attention to those who have not yet acquired the skills and access and who lack the power and status needed to meaningfully participate. A more participatory culture is one where more people have access to the means of cultural production and circulation and one where more key decisions are made with the active and expanded participation of community members. A more