The Culture Industry and Participatory Audiences

This work offers a discussion of participatory culture as a disruption to the previously held dominance of the culture industry, while also exploring the tensions created in this emerging media landscape through analysis and examination of the current Australian media policy, regulation, and content distribution landscape. The text argues that the culture industry colonises participatory cultural practices and absorbs them into the practices of the industry, to reveal that what emerges from this colonisation is an audience that misrecognises their agency as participants in the production of culture. The discourse surrounding participatory culture positions the audience as active in cultural production and falsely emancipates them as consumers, with little acknowledgement of the exploitation of labour that is occurring. Keltie exposes how, as the culture industry folds participatory practices back into its own industry practices, audience participation, in effect, becomes authorised by the culture industry.

Emma Keltie is a research officer at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. She managed the Engaging Creativity through Technologies project as part of the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre, and prior to joining Western Sydney University worked as a lecturer in communication and cultural theory. Her research interests include participatory culture, the role of technology in the mental health and well-being of young people, digital storytelling, and media convergence.