The Participatory Cultures Handbook

How did we get from Hollywood to YouTube? What makes Wikipedia so different from a traditional encyclopedia? Has blogging dismantled journalism as we know it?

Our media landscape has undergone a seismic shift as digital technology has fostered the rise of "participatory culture," in which knowledge is originated, created, distributed, and evaluated in radically new ways. The Participatory Cultures Handbook is an indispensable, interdisciplinary guide to this rapidly changing terrain. With short, accessible essays from leading geographers, political scientists, communication theorists, game designers, activists, policy makers, physicists, and poets, this volume will introduce students to the concept of participatory culture, explain how researchers approach participatory culture studies, and provide original examples of participatory culture in action. Topics include crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, grid computing, digital activism in authoritarian countries, collaborative poetry, collective intelligence, participatory budgeting, and the relationship between video games and civic engagement.

Contributors include: Daren Brabham, Helen Burgess, Clay Calvert, Mia Consalvo, Kelly Czarnecki, David M. Faris, Dieter Fuchs, Owen Gallagher, Clive Goodinson, Alexander Halvais, Cynthia Hawkins, John Heaven, The Jannissary Collective, Henry Jenkins, Barry Joseph, Christopher Kelty, Pierre Levy, Sophia B. Liu, Rolf Luehrs, Patrick Meier, Jason Mittell, Sarah Pearce, W. James Potter, Howard Rheingold, Suzanne Scott, Benjamin Stokes, Thomas Swiss, Paul Taylor, Will Venters, Jen Ziemke

Aaron Delwiche is an associate pofessor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He teaches courses on hacking subcultures, transmedia storytelling and video-game design and criticism. His experiments with games in the classroom have been covered by publications ranging from Wired to The Guardian (UK). In 2009, with support from the Lennox Foundation, he organized the lecture series "reality Hackers: The Next Wave of Media Revolutionaries"and published an anthology of essays related to the series.

Jennifer Jacobs Henderson is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Henderson is the author of the 2010 book Defending the Good News: The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Plan to Expand the First Amendment. She specializes in issues of media law, the ethics of media, and the use of participatory cultures for political and social action. For more than a decade, she has been researching how voices outside of American mainstream discourse have pressured the government to expand free speech protections.