Corporate Appropriation of Participatory Culture

Abstract

Reportedly, there currently are more than one billion internet users, with two billion users expected by 2011 (out of a projected world population of seven billion around that time). Among the top ten countries in internet usage are the United States, China, India, Germany, Brazil, and Russia, where internet penetration reaches about two-thirds of the population. With businesses – particularly those in the cultural and creative industries – rapidly supplementing or even transferring investments to online, internet has become the foremost frontier over which symbolic, financial and cultural battles are fought. In this chapter, I explore the intersections of commerce and creativity, content and connectivity in terms of a corporate appropriation of the participatory media culture of internet, using social media in general and weblogs in particular as a case study. I will argue that without extending existing definitions of media literacies, and without reinterpreting intellectual property and copyright legislation to extend protections outside of the boundaries of the firm or the state (towards the individual professional or amateur culture creators), the presumably co-creative and collaborative potential of the new digital and networked media ecology will be an exclusive playground for political and commercial institutions rather than a platform for individual cultural entrepreneurs.