When discussing the current state of the media it becomes clear that contemporary media landscape is mirrored through a significant paradox. This refers to ownership structutres, power, participation and ideology.
As we tend to face an accelerating ownership concentration around major conglomerates, including digital and social media platforms, the media use facilitates a customer and consumer culture. The paradox lies within the fact that a rapidly growing social movement environment, including media activism, participatory culture, collaborative media and media entrepreneurship, has become a vital counterpoint in intellectual debates on power surrounding media and media technology. From the point of view of democracy this development in alternative media- and political spheres is sometimes hard to comprehend. It emerges as a power-struggle and a challenging approach towards established social institutions in the postmodern world of today. The manifestations of this development are several and take different forms, one of which I have written about earlier. The key concept is participation and our view on citizenship (also elaborated on here). But I stumbled over an interesting report on social dimensions of participation which can be found and downloaded here.
In the foreword it says: ” The project explores how and why individuals get involved and stay involved in different forms of participation, to improve knowledge and understanding of people’s pathways into and through participation and of the factors that shape their participation over time”.
I just wanted to post it as a tip, something I will try to do more often since we all tend to get across so much knowledge and ideas but seldom seed to our peers.