The most powerful hybrid of communications and entertainment is “particitainment”—entertaining communications that connects us with some larger purpose or enterprise. - Futurist Paul Saffo, Consumers and Interactive New Media: A Hierarchy of Desires, 1993

I like this term “particitainment.” I can already hear my peers groaning at the introduction of another term to describe participatory culture, convergence culture, participation as the new consumption, and so on. But it’s clear from the getgo, Participation as entertainment. It’s not a new concept on the whole - for instance, one must participate in a roller coaster ride to get the entertainment or thrill. But in this era of user-generated content particitainment takes on a more specific tone of production and, from where I’m heading with this, labor, as a means of entertainment.

Saffo ties this notion of participation as entertainment to an even larger concept, defining particitainment as “entertaining communications that connect us with some larger purpose or enterprise.” Here it is the word enterprise that stands out to me. Written in 1993, Saffo could have meant anything by this (a prerequisite talent of Futurists), but looking at it now I jump to the bungling oft-maligned enterprises of Corporate America* and consider particitainment as those participatory acts of cultural production, largely enabled by the digital revolution, that entertain the user/consumer while producing a product of direct value to an enterprise. This leads me to my questions about labor/economy/user-generated content, wondering if there is a free labor market, slaving, under the delusion of entertainment, to the financial gain of those smart corporations that have begun to embrace the new participation as consumption model.

15 minutes up.

*must concede that Corporate America, in the all-initial-caps-sense is a diminishing notion in our ever advancing global economy.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Consumerism, Economics, Social Media, Thesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.