Which is the path of the citizen participation?

What is participation? What is participatory media? With the birth of the Internet and then with the developments of the web itself as a web characterized by being more open to the participation of the users, what was called web 2.0; we can say that the participation of the population in the reality, the development of the ideas, and the creation of the new ones, can be more easy. Here you have a video that summarize the idea of “where good ideas come from” by Steven Johnson that will make you think about what participation is.

After seeing this video, you can think that the participation online is great. That the way the ideas are being created nowadays is done by the population and for the population, but although I don’t want you to be upset I think that the phenomenon is well thought in the theory but I don’t see, at least in my environment, that thinks behave like this.

I will start to talk about McLuhan. He saw that the medium was the message, what means the content, he states that the technology was like part of our limbs and in fact I think this is like that, I mean, nowadays almost everybody use technology as it were part of their bodies or at least people use technology in order to get the reality and life the current times. The technology is like a tool with which we must live. But what is the problem here? What is the link of all this and the participation?

I see in “the medium is the message” a problem nowadays. The people, at least the youth generation, are blinded by the new technology. The participatory media supposed to be a way in which the population can be part of the system, can be part of the democracy in order to create a participatory democracy in which all of us we have the right to speak and create ideas. But.. at what is reduced the participation? To the social media, chats and games online. The majority of young people spend lots of hours online but in entertainment issues, what means that the participation is being reduced to this, the participation is reduced to create a virtual reality and live in it more that in the real reality. The medium is all and the content has lost importance. This is a riskiness because I think that because of this the new generation has lost the capacity of astonishment when are talking about the reality.

What I mean with all this is that the consumer is not as prosumer, as creative, as involved with the media as It seems. When nowadays we are watching the news and see what is happening in our countries, not just the wars –that has completely lost our capacity of astonishment- but also but is happening with the politics. For example in Spain, the government is damaging the country. The government is cutting the public services, is sacking a lot of people from the enterprises and is doing measures completely antisocial; and moreover it is been published that the corruption in the party is huge. What is all this? This is completely surrealistic and unfair, and what is amazing is that people has lost completely the capacity of astonishment and don’t participate in the public system in order to develop it. There are some people that, of course, do demonstration but this is not according with the current times. This way of participate is old and young people should utilize technology and social media for this, people should use it as a social tool in order to participate in the public problems of the society.  

What has been said in the past paragraph should us make think:

 Is the society really active? Is the society making things change? Or is the technology what is making people being evade of this reality? What would be the future? Would be people be in a virtual reality in which all the feelings as the indignation, would be lost? Which is the path of the participatory media?