Book Companion
The By Any Media Necessary book explores new forms of political activities and identities that have emerged from the practices of participatory culture and are impacting how American youth think of their civic identities.
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen dramatic increases in grassroots access to the means of cultural production and circulation and improvements to the infrastructure required for collective action (Jenkins, Ford, and Green, 2013). This participatory turn in culture has been mirrored by shifts in the ways citizens are collectively and individually exerting power within the political process. Young men and women who learned how to use their cameras recording skateboarding videos, to mashup images to make cute cat pictures, to edit making fan videos, are now turning their skills towards political speech and grassroots mobilization. These “creative activists” are often speaking to each other through images borrowed from commercial entertainment but remixed to communicate their own messages; they are often deploying social media tools and platforms, sometimes in ways that challenge corporate interests; and they are forging communities through acts of media circulation. The conclusion of Henry Jenkins’s 2006 book, Convergence Culture, proposed that a networked society would soon be applying what they learned through play within participatory culture towards more purposeful realms, such as education, religion, and politics.
The MAPP Project focuses on groups and networks that are largely youth driven communities with low thresholds to participation, make effective use of new media platforms, seek strategies that bridge the cultural and the political, and represent a broad spectrum of demographics, causes, and organizational structures. Research on the case studies included in this book was carried out over a period of four years and included interviews, participant observation and media content analysis.
By Any Media Necessary represents the culmination of this research, comparing and contrasting across the individual case studies in order to propose a fuller
conceptual model for thinking about how such organizations scaffold and sustain participatory politics.
Building on (and contributing to) the MacArthur Foundations Youth and Participatory Politics Network's concept of participatory politics, this paths supplements themes and examples contained in the book.