Towards a New Critique of Online Participatory Culture: User-Generated Content and the Assembling of Software and Users.

Online participatory culture equates access to the means of communication with renewal of democratic participation, thus offering a compelling answer to concerns about control over the media. Yet, efforts to understand the power dynamics that shape cultural practices of communication online should not be abandoned. The new context of online user-generated communication requires tracing how online media systems set up the parameters of interaction and experience among users and between users and means of communication through networks of software systems, new types of communicative activities, social norms and cultural practices. This paper presents a cultural theory framework that includes Actor-network theory to trace the nascent power dynamics in the user-generated content context. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how question of meaning needs to be integrated with that of media and software technologies in order to examine how user-generated content platforms set up the conditions for experiencing and sharing meaning online. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]