User participation in a    
socio-technical ecosystem

Abstract

The user, Time Magazine's 2006 “Person of the Year”, is marking a new state in the evolution of the audience from culture industry's passive consumer to the interactive user communities of 'Web 2.0'.
Research on consumers, users and audiences was limited to entities such as the individual consumer and user or the audience and the community. The question for participation was measured on the consumers' ability to influence the cultural product itself. In consequence the user was described either as a hero or a dupe, in order to constitute a case of either dependency or autonomy of the culture industry. Participation has to be questioned in terms of agency and relations. The network metaphor helped to establish a view of collaborating communities, but was veiling the interdependent relations between a socio-technical ecosystem consisting of a plurality of users and technological systems.

This paper is revisiting the user participation in the extended culture industry in terms of user agency, media specificity and interdependent relations between users, corporate companies and the surrounding socio-technical ecosystem. Using cases from 'social bookmarking' to game console hacking the paper argues for a definition of participation in terms of interdependence to the socio-technical ecosystem, relations to various participants or actors and degree of involvement in the process of labor.