The Research On Participatory Culture In New Media Era

New media achieves not only technology innovation, but also affects human economic activities, social structure and cultural patterns at a deeper level. This paper talks about audience participation in new media era from a cultural perspective. Participatory culture is not just about audience participating in the new media environment, and publishing their own work. Participatory culture is a complex field, covering technical, social discourse, including the new roles of the audience, the process of cultural production, and various participants in a dynamic link. This article does not think that consumers have become producers, control the whole information age. That is an overly romantic idea, formed by a number of popular discourses, but not truly happening.This paper talks about features of audience participation in the new media era. By discussing the meanings and contents, this paper thinks that the power of media culture is the core issue of participatory culture. With help of political economy and cultural studies, this paper explores theoretical and practical difficulties in participatory culture field.On the one hand, for further study of audience participation behavior, this article places the experience and behavior of the audience in their personal lives and social context, focuses on their own experience with the text. On the other hand, this paper articulates the overall media ecology and the audience.In other words, this paper attempts to interpret how audience participating in and consuming new media and gain inspiration from their own point of view. It is not one-dimensional cheer of promotion of individual freedom by new technology. While describing the individual empowerment participatory culture bring about, this paper discusses the power operation in the same time.This paper argues that due to technology developments, new media have gained the imago of turning the former consumer of corporate media content from dupe into hero, mastering the new means of production and actively participating in the creation and distribution of-mostly digital-artifacts. And indeed, the new technologies have led to an emerging participatory culture where audience participating significantly in the production and distribution of the cultural industry goods. Recently, popular discourses are embracing the phenomenon of producing users, labeling them Pro-Ams, professional amateurs, and describing their production logic as Wikinomics. The emerging participatory culture constitutes a converging of different participants and old and new media practices into a field where the distinctions between user and producer is increasingly blurred, and a lot of power are conflicting with each other, including commercial power, political power,and so on.The rise of participatory culture has brought traditional media opportunities and challenges. Traditional media needs to locate itself accurately on the basis of an open platform for content creation, to attract the audience’s collective wisdom and to keep new complementary relationship with the audience. Furthermore, Traditional media should use advantages of social media for reference to inspire audience participation. Only in this way, traditional media can gain sensitivity and diversity in the dissemination of content and turn challenges into opportunities to achieve leapfrog development.Thus, in the field of participatory culture of the new media era, it is not enough to only emphasize participation. Cultivating participatory culture needs supports from various social forces. On government level, policy should commit to make media environment more suitable for the development of social justice, community autonomy and cultural diversity. Meanwhile, we should strengthen the new media morality, and carry out new media literacy education.