The college graduates of 2006 have never known a time when personal computers, mobile phones, television time-shift recording and other technologies were not at their fingertips.
 
Josiah is a 20 year old college student who hasn't known a time when he didn't have access to a computer. For him, computers have always been available in school, and he simply expects that he will have one to use. Doing so is second nature to him. He also knows that internet access (usually wireless) will be readily available wherever he goes, and if some resource he needs is not yet available at the click of a mouse today, it¹s just a matter of "when" and not "if" it will be.
 
This young man connects with his friends on MySpace and Facebook (he calls himself, “a HUGE Facebook’er”) and has met many other like-minded people in both places. He uses instant messaging and text messaging on his mobile phone constantly, updates his space online frequently, creates and delivers music and video (or links to ones he likes so others can view them) and tracks the updates of those in his circle of friends.
 
Josiah decided it was too difficult to keep tabs on everyone so -- taking matters into his own hands and tapping the technical expertise of his younger brother -- he developed a Web-based software application to automatically do this for him (like many other Twentysomethings, Josiah is actively working on how to take this application to market as a product). This is not an unusual response for Josiah or many others: if something they need or want is not available, they simply figure out how to create it on their own. In fact, this behavior calls out a fundamental difference between those living in a participation culture vs. those who have come before.
 
When asked about his consumption of traditional media, Josiah replied, "I watch a fair amount of TV, but it’s mostly news that I'm simultaneously tracking online to supplement my understanding of the happenings. I'm not much of a print newspaper guy anymore, but I've set up Safari (note: Apple’s Web browser built into Mac OS X) to aggregate content for me from all the important newspapers/mags (NY Times, Economist, Minneapolis StarTribune, etc), as well as from all of the major news services (CNN, BBC, Reuters), so I guess in a sense I read the "paper" almost constantly."
 
People like Josiah -- techn-savvy, comfortable with technologies they grew up with and harboring zero fear of hacking and modifying them to their own requirements -- expect that they can communicate either in real-time with friends or in non-real-time by customizing their online spaces. To do so, Josiah simply leveraged tools and approaches that are readily available (like RSS syndication), to mold, shape and modify what is offered in order to serve him. This as opposed to waiting for someone to anticipate his needs, decide for him what’s important, and deliver it to him someday.
 
Josiah -- and millions like him who range in age from a decade older to a decade younger ­ are demonstrating a new type of relationship with the internet and World Wide Web. It includes connecting and communicating through Instant messaging with their friends, playing online games, downloading  and sharing music, building spots in MySpace, watching YouTube videos (while many are creating and uploading their own), doing homework and research, looking for jobs, commenting on (or writing) blogs, performing their own shows as podcasts and much more.
 
This shift in internet use from passive to active is at the heart of their digital behavior and can be summed up in one word: participation. The mainstreaming of this participation culture is perfectly characterized by the Pew Internet and American Life Project as “Web is the New Normal.”
 
This is not a United States-only phenomena. It is a cross-cultural, global one.
 
 
TAKING A STEP BACK
When some sort of core, enabling infrastructure comes to the forefront and becomes accessible, it changes the opportunities for creation, invention and delivery (i.e., distribution) of products and services. People naturally gravitate toward it because it provides options that are better, cheaper and faster. The internet and World Wide Web are only the most recent examples of this taking place but there have been others which have produced paradigm shifts just as important to society:
 
  1. • Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press democratized the printed word, exploded literacy throughout Europe and enabled books, newspapers and other mass media to begin but did little to empower individuals to participate (though it certainly enabled learning, information gathering and more)  
 
  1. • The telegraph and telephone empowered personalized communications, connecting people for business and personal affairs. The creation and explosion in mobile phone telephony -- and the leapfrogging of wiredline infrastructure -- by emerging world economies is enabling a new generation with communications possibilities never before seen
 
  1. • The railroad, automobile and airplane -- and their resulting supportive infrastructure -- enabled efficiencies in physical goods and information distribution and delivery while simultaneously providing people with the ability to move themselves and their own communications (e.g, letters) from place to place quickly and efficiently.
 
  1. • The personal computer came to market in the late 1970¹s (the 25 year anniversary of the IBM PC in August, arguably legitimized microcomputer use in business). The remarkable and seemingly endless possibilities of this machine, with its operating system to handle the machine and its housekeeping tasks like windows, menus, folders, etc., was clearly important. Yet it was the opportunity for applications to be built upon it by anyone with the skills and desire that has been nothing short of world-changing for everyone who has used them.
 
The microcomputer has forever altered our acquisition of information, its management, manipulation, sharing, collaboration, publishing and value (as well as commerce, communication media creation, etc.). However, all of this may pale in comparison with the power of a global Internet, the capability of internet hosted or connected applications, and the potential of people with the knowledge, comfort and understanding of how to participate in this newly enabled world.
 
 
ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES
What is enabling people to so easily create media, publish their own pages and participate online in such rich, interactive ways? It will help as you read this report to consider the wealth of enabling technologies which have arrived and are empowering people to participate in new and compelling ways. The net effect of all of these tools is an increasingly available suite of offerings that empower, enable and assist people in participating in the Internet and many of the new applications built upon it.
  1.  
  2. •Inexpensive personal computers (extraordinarily powerful PC’s and Mac’s) that can be purchased for far less than ever before and come bundled with an increasing number of applications as standard
  3.  
  4. •Consumer video camcorders (and digital cameras sporting video capture capability) which range in price from $150 - $2,000 and above
  5.  
  6. •A proliferation of applications to edit and produce video, audio and images; even free, open source ones exist (e.g., Audacity)
  7.  
  8. •Camera phones that have enjoyed increased penetration and demonstrable improvements in quality of both image and video capture
  9.  
  10. •Blogging software -- both downloadable free or as free/paid hosted services ­ now so widely available that Technorati tracks more than 57 million blogs
  11.  
  12. •Hosted media sites like YouTube, Hipcast, Revver and others which allow people who have created their own video and audio to share it with others via their blog, MySpace or Facebook space, or web site
  13.  
  14. •Volumes of flash tools and widgets (little snippets of code one can place on a blog, web page or MySpace/Facebook space such as that offered by WidgetBox)
 
The net effect of all of these tools is that there is an increasingly available suite of offerings that empower, enable and assist people in participating.
 
 
PARTICIPATION IS CHANGING THE FACE OF MEDIA
Choice allows people to choose. It sounds simple, but it is important to remember that anything large or small, dominant or niche, monopoly or immersed in competition, commercial or open source causes people to make a choice.  
 
For example, once hundreds of cable TV channels appeared, the three dominant US television broadcast networks faced erosion in their market share as people opted for programming that had not been available in the past. Today’s plethora of blogs, podcasts, videos online, social hubs and other attention-grabbing participatory media is shifting people’s attention again. More and more, these new media options are the media of choice.
 
Some business leaders find it difficult to be convinced of the dramatic and accelerating shifts occurring -- especially in the coveted 18-34 year old demographic -- as the market turns away from TV, newspapers, radio, magazines and other mainstream media, but this is exactly what is taking place. Of course, this comes as no surprise to those who are already using digital video recorders (e.g., TiVo) to time-shift television and skip the ads, just as they ignore ad words, banner ads and other in-your-face attempts to entice us to click on them. Instead, it is their reality.
 
An August, 2006 Ad Age article entitled, "McKinsey Study Predicts Continuing Decline in TV Selling Power” opened with, "McKinsey & Co. is telling a host of major marketers that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990."  Here are a few key aspects of the article...
 
  1. • Thank a combination of older technologies such as cable, PC computers, cellphones, CD players, VCRs, game consoles and the internet, along with more recent ones -- PDAs, broadband Internet, digital cable, home wireless networks, MP3 players, DVRs and VOD-- for those changes. And teens foretell an even more radical shift in future media consumption, the report points out: They spend less than half as much time watching TV as typical adults do. Teens also spend 600% more time online, surfing the web.
 
  1. • According to Forrester Research's most recent North American Consumer Technology Adoption Study, people ages 18 to 26 spend more time online than watching TV and are adopting new technology faster than any other generation. Because of that, they tend to be more receptive to blog, podcast and mobile-web ads.
 
  1. • Last year [online media] was $12.5 billion, by end of 2007 digital advertising will be $18 to $25 billion. ... So we're seeing a lot of growth, but if you want to match up share of attention and share of dollars it couldn't happen for that reason." The TV ad industry is a $68 billion one.
 
All of this adds up to HUGE challenges facing the advertising community that are, in fact, quite different than just figuring out how to blast ads in to new media/internet distribution channels.
 
The primary reason for advertising is to drive awareness at the point where demand is seeking supply. Of course, creating demand, driving competitive differentiation and building brand are the other principal reasons advertising exists -- which is getting tougher to deliver.
 
 
 
MEMES AND THE EMERGENT PARTICIPATION CULTURE
A meme is a piece of cultural information, defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain trackers.”
 
Memes relate to this report because the Internet, Participation Applications and People are able -- for the first time in human history -- to transmit, communicate and imbue other cultures with their own respective cultural memes while also creating completely new ones that cross cultural boundaries previously based only on geography. Stop and think for a moment about the paradigms, concepts and deliverables possible on the Internet and through applications that are just emerging or don’t yet exist which do, by their very nature, exist in the geography known as cyberspace. People around the world -- who are connected, communicating, clustering and participating -- will be creating new memes transmitting them to their own culture.
 
Cultural anthropologists will one day undoubtedly examine how collective wisdom, human connections and consciousness-connecting-capabilities, converged to allow people all over the planet to come together for fun, work, problem solving, co-creation or just ranting and raving.
 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), recognizing this potential, created the Center for Collective Intelligence. Their mission? While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.
 
In another development pointing out the importance of the web as a focal point of cultural information, The New York Times had this article (BBC discusses it here) on November 2, 2006 about what two major universities -- along with the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee -- are undertaking:
 
  1. The Web has become such a force in commerce and culture that a group of leading university researchers now deems it worthy of its own field of study.
  2.  
  3. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain plan to announce today that they are starting a joint research program in Web science.
  4.  
  5. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web’s basic software, is leading the program. An Oxford-educated Englishman, Mr. Berners-Lee is a senior researcher at M.I.T., a professor at the University of Southampton and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an Internet standards-setting organization.
  6.  
  7. Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work.
  8.  
  9. “The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the Web.”
  10.  
  11. The Web science program is an academic effort, but corporate technology executives and computer scientists said the research could greatly influence Web-based businesses. They pointed in particular to research by Mr. Berners-Lee and others to build more “intelligence” into the Web — moving toward what is known as the Semantic Web — as an area of study that could yield a big payoff.
 
Memes moving around the planet at the speed of the Internet; collective intelligence working together to co-create; an acceleration of knowledge and removing inefficiency; and possible downsides from subversives and terrorists better able to coalesce as a group. All of this stands before us as cultures (emphasis on the plural), just like individuals, become participative at an accelerating rate.
 
 
INTERNET, APPLICATIONS AND PEOPLE
In the following pages, the three pillars which have already enabled the Rise of the Participation Culture will be examined:
 
1) Internet as a Platform: We will observe how core industry standards, hosted application developers and other technologies have already coming together to form ‘the perfect storm’ of enablers that Tim O’Reilly has called "the emergent Internet operating system.” This convergence has also been dubbed Web 2.0.
 
2) Participation Applications: We will discuss a few of the most powerful emerging applications -- and trends – occurring, which have already created a myriad of compelling reasons for people to invest energy, effort, time and money into them.
 
3) We will present an overview of the People who use and rely on Web 2.0 in order to understand the demographic and psychographic makeup of those driving this culture of participation
 
4) Lastly this report will consider What’s Next as we acknowledge today’s Participation Culture trends and forecast what we might expect going forward.
 
 
EXPECTED OUTCOME
It is not realistic to assume that this brief, high level overview of the Participation Culture is anything but that...brief. Yet having an overview of what is changing with the Internet itself, the applications taking advantage of it and/or being delivered on the Web today, as well as some sense of its penetration into the culture is fundamental to participating in the world today and going forward. It is this report’s goal to provide that overview.
 
This report has been populated with links which will allow you to go off on tangents and build a deeper understanding of many key areas. In addition, there is a place for your own participation: a Discussion forum. Feel free to register (it’s fast and free) or just read the posts.
 
Now on to the report...
“My use of the net is unique (but increasingly less so) in that I don't go actively finding information so much as I've used technologies like syndication and instant communication to set up a stream of information that comes to me, 24/7. Instead of going out and seeking the information, I've more or less told the information to seek me.”
Josiah Gulden Interview
October, 2006
“Web is the “New Normal” as the vast majority of teens in the United States, 87% of those aged 12 to 17, now use the internet. That amounts to about 21 million youth who use the internet, up from roughly 17 million when we surveyed this age cohort in late 2000. Not only has the wired share of the teenage population grown, but teens’ use of the internet has intensified.”
Pew Internet and American Life Project
While many of us were placing our attention elsewhere, the post-dotcom-crash World Wide Web and global Internet continued to evolve. Once seemingly going to be solely focused on ecommerce, transaction-centric and primarily Web page publishing paradigms, an amazing array of Web-based applications has burst forth and a new culture is forming comprised of people participating within them. An underlying infrastructure to support these applications has emerged geared to enabling, engaging and encouraging applications to be developed, but also to enable these applications to be leveraged on a massive scale. As a result, a global culture of tech-savvy, always-on and always-connected people is enthusiastically using these new Participation Applications and are shaping our networked world in new and fundamentally profound ways.