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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Aaron Delwiche, Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (eds.), The Participatory Cultures Handbook, Routledge, London-New York 2012, pp. 313
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2013-10-01
2023-10-09
2013-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Mariagrazia Fanchi
2013/10/01
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano
2036-461X
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Aaron Delwiche, Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (eds.), The Participatory Cultures Handbook, Routledge, London-New York 2012, pp. 313
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to the European theoretical debate which in Ultimately,
                                             different one of the brightest goals of this volu
ages involved, among others, Arnheim, Kracauer,
                                           - as well as Yumibe's - is the emergence of a bistor.
Bazin, Antonioni, Balazs, Dreyer and Ejsenstejn.         ical paradigm based on continuity: social processes
With regards to the choice of the case studies, the      and cultural values change very slowly and, beyond
volume - unfortunately without pictures - encom-         crisis and turning points, the transformations - both
passes both cult and minor movies, with a special        theoretical and practical - flow gradually and with-
care for the Italian highbrow and lowbrow produc-out sudden breaks. According to Yumibe and Pierotti,
tion ("diva film," comedy, musical melodrama). the history of chromatic cinema itself did not start
With its anti-deterministic intersection of technolo- in 1895, but well before that year, thanks to pre-ex-
gy, industry and aesthetic theory, this historical in-
                                                    isting techniques and psychological attitudes toward
quiry on cinematic colour style undermines the lead-     colour images. Therefore new colour technologies do
ership of "masters" and "masterpieces" allowing,         not merely replace old ones in a one-directional and
instead, a reappraisal of the collective and nameless    irreversible way, but they keep on coexisting and cir-
contributions to chromatic practices. Colour was         culating, though in a minor mode. Significantly, this
actually often designed and processed by laborato-       idea of continuity is still valid and useful to approach
ry technicians, who supported a codified and con-the current techniques of digital colouring, which
venient array of aesthetic options untied from the enable to recreate all the previous colour styles and
director's will (this happened, for example, with the looks, from hand painting onwards, in a genealogy
coloured copies of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, that is more and more complex and multilayered.
Robert Wiene, 1920, which we were used to think
exclusively in black and white).                                  [Elena Gipponi, Università IULM, Milano]


Aaron Delwiche, Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (eds.),        and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson, The Participatory
The Participatory Cultures Handbook,                     Cultures Handbook is therefore not remarkable in
Routledge, London-New York 2012, pp. 313.                   terms of the originality of the topic. But it differs
                                                       from the numerous reflections on participation in
In recent ears the term participation has become the   at least three wavs. The first is the structure of the
watchword for a broad range of studies on media andwork: the book is a collection of twenty eight essays,
   communication processes in the digital realm. Its divided in eight sections, that cover the main aspects
fortune is essentially linked to the need to mark the of the debate on participation: fan cultures, co-crea-
distance from the interpretative models developed tive processes, building cultures of knowledge, civic
between the end of the nineties and the beginning cultures, activism, education and media literacy, as
of the new mill ennium, with their store of categorieswell as the introduction and conclusion that provide
and labels. In particular the concept of participation an interesting definition of the issue. It is therefore
has progressively replaced the concept of interactiv- an extremely versatile text, providing both a global
ity, to illustrate - as Nico Carpenter effectively set view of the issue as well as examining its individ-
out in an essay from a few years ago* - a more com-    ual aspects in depth. The strength of Delwiche and
plex experience, which is not limited to changing the Henderson's book lies in the selection of the authors,
interface or the single media environment, but ex-     which includes media theoreticians, communication
tends its range of action to the entire system and con-professionals and young researchers. The multipli-
sequently society. In simple terms we can say that cation of the points of view and the debate - literally
participation is part of the debate around web 3.0, as in the question and answer essay between Suzanne
interactivity was part of the debate on web 2.0. The   Scott and Henry Jenkins - between different ways
importance of the concept of participation in the cur- of intending and criticising participation allows for
rent reflection on the media has triggered a wealth of a rich and detailed reconstruction of the phenome-
 contributions. The book edited by Aaron Delwiche non. Last, but not least, The Participatory Cultures


130
  Handbook distinguishes itself for the analytical per-   contexts in which the analytical perspective promot
  spective that it employs and that can be traced back ed by the work has focused on with greater attention,
  to four fundamental principles.                      and even painstaking accuracy, is naturally civic
  The first is opting for an historical reading of the    practices and the forms of participatory democracy.
  participation phenomena. The idea running through       They are exemplarily and analytically discussed by,
                                               amongst
  many of the essays collected in the book is that the others, Dieter Fuchs.
  form that participation is taking today must be in-     The third aspect that characterises the approach of
 terpreted through broad and temporally extended          Delwiche and Henderson' book is the attention paid
 processes. The history of participation suggested by     to grasp all the implications of the phenomena of
 Delwiche and Henderson in the introductory essay         participation. That is, the effort to go beyond the ex-
 and in Delwiche's subsequent reconstruction of the clusively positive vision that characterised the first
 antecedents to the contemporary participatory cul-stage of the debate, in order tothe complex-
                                                                                    examine
 tures; the markedly autobiographical essay by How-ity and also the ambiguity of participatory practices.
 ard Rheingold on the emergence of social media or        This third aspect emerges in the individual essays
 the excursus on the history of blogs by Alexander        (Paul Taylor returns to the doubts raised by Zize
 Halavais, allow the reader to free the reflection on     at the end of the mineties, on the actual degree of
 participation from a synchronic and punctual per-freedom afforded by the web 2.0 and that the author
 spective (tied to individual events or limited envi- summarises in the question "interactivity or inter-
ronments - a website, a community, etc...) and to         passivity?," which is also the title of the essay), and
identify the 'profound' reasons of the forms, effec-      in the composition of the work that brings together
tiveness and limits of contemporary participatory         essays that set out the capacity of participative prac-
practices (the double root of the participation phe-tices to generate resources (the phylogenesis of the
  nomena that originate in the jamming cultures of collective intelligence proposed by Pierre Lévy is
the sixties and seventies and in fandom explains, for     exemplary, or the analysis of the forms of creativity
      example, the variety of manifestations and practices that participative environments promote by Thomas
and the profound difference in the motivations and        Swiss and Helen Burgess or the appreciation of the
characteristics of the participative initiatives).        playful video experience as an opportunity to mature
The second principle adopted by The Participatory         civic skills by Benjamin Stokes), to the condemna-
Cultures Handbook is an analytical perspective that       tion of the conditioning and ideological restrictions
is not limited to providing a catalogue of the various    that the participative initiatives are subject to (Scott,
expressions of participation - from activism to forms     for example, considers the phenomenon of the fan
of co-creation, from participatory budgeting to fan-boy authors as a form of institutional participation
   dom cultures - but it attempts to provide an account that is heavily promoted by the media as a mouth-
of the     complexity of the phenomenon, also within      piece for their own contents or even as a free incu-
the      same range of action. Christopher Kelty, for     bator of creativity).
      example,
           reminds us of the need to introduce aFinally
                                                  dis- the originality of the book lies in the mark-
tinction between participatory practices, not only to     edly ecological perspective used to moderate the ex-
achieve a more accurate mapping of these processes,       pectations, principles, values, costumes and methods
but also to achieve a more adequate assessment, and       of operation of all the subjects involved in the pro-
therefore promotional, criteria. In particular Kelty      cesses of participation. The choice of using the term
suggests a differentiation between forms of partici-       "culture" in the plural in the book's title expresses
pation promoted by institutions and those promoted        what is perhaps the most important contribution of
by users; and between participation initiatives where     the text: promoting the processes of participation
all the phases of the process are shared, including       cannot fail to acknowledge all instances of partici-
the definition of the objectives, from initiatives that   pation, from the institutional to the ones expressed
involve participants to fulfil a series of preset tasks by individuals. This challenge demands attention on
that have not been discussed collectively. One of the     all levels: from research that is called upon to exam-

                                                                                                                 131
 ine in the most balanced way possible all the forms       the users; finally on the ethical level by promoting
 that participation is assuming, avoiding enthusiasms      respect and full reciprocity. It is no accident that the
 and demonizations; from politics that is called upon      final essay in the volume is called: Toward an Eth-
 to promote on a productive, economic and juridi-          ical Framework for Online Participatory Culture".
 cal level the new cultural models that enhance the
 wealth of skills and infrastructures of institutions            [Mariagrazia Fanchi - Università Cattolica del
 and at the same time the requests and proposals of                                      Sacro Cuore, Milano]



 1     In the 1990s Jacques Aumont gave a significant contribution in this field. Cf. Jacques Aumont, Introduction
       à la couleur: des discours aux images, Armand Colin, Paris 1994 and Jacques Aumont (ed.), La couleur en
       cinéma, Cinémathèque française, Musée du cinéma - Fondazione Mazzotta, Paris-Milano 1995.
 2     See, for example, Angela Dalle Vacche, Brian Price (eds.), Color. The Film Reader, Routledge, New York
      2006; Wendy Everett (ed.), Questions of Colour in Cinema. From Paintbrush to Pixel, Lang, Oxford-Bern
      2007; Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow. Color Design in the 1930s, University of Texas
      Press, Austin 2007; Film History, Early Colour, vol. 21, no. 1-2, 2009; Simon Brown, Sarah Street, Liz Wat-
      kins (eds.), Color and the Moving Image. History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, Routledge, New York-London
      2013.
      Two previous Italian works on the same subject are Monica Dall'Asta, Guglielmo Pescatore, Fotogenia. Storie
      e teorie del cinema, Il colore nel cinema, no. 1, Club, Bologna 1994 and Luca Venzi, Il colore e la compo-
      sizione filmica, ETS, Pisa 2006.
 4    Nico Carpenter, "Contextualising Author-Audience Convergences", in Cultural Studies, vol. 25, no. 4-5,
      2011, рр. 517-533.




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