Bart Talks Back: The Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture

Abstract

This chapter traces the concept of participatory media culture as it has emerged from the field of cultural studies and evolved through the work of John Fiske and Henry Jenkins. Building on Fiske’s thinking, Jenkins’s scholarship on media fandom has fundamentally revised cultural studies’ traditional neo-Marxist perspective of (sub-)cultural resistance versus an assumed dominant ideology. In order to outline a theoretical framework for this study, the chapter reconsiders the concept of participatory culture and specifies its political as well as its poetic particularities. In addition, I discuss popular culture’s participatory character in relation to Fiske’s notion of popular cultural capital and what I call “popular semiosis.”