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that does not necessarily seek consensus as the end goal. To an extent, participants
may refashion discursive space and actually help change established political cultures
to allow for differences and dissent to emerge productively. In this way, democracy
and sustainable development practice may find common ground and a means of
effectively reaching sound decisions collectively (Bendor
et al
., 2012). Mainstream
journalists may also find themselves writing more freely in their blogs and micro-
blogs than in their set piece articles and reports (Lasorsa
et al
., 2012). Paul Mason
(2013), a journalist with the BBC, has suggested that different platforms serve different
functions. For instance, Twitter tends to be used for updates, social media sites like
Facebook are used for forming groups or finding like-minded people, YouTube and
photo-sharing services such Flickr or Picasa are used for sharing evidence, blog for
analysis, while traditional broadcast media often take on a curatorial function
collecting and collating different sources and informing the public who are not active
Internet users.
The wiki phenomena is a further example of Web 2.0-based collaboration,
interactivity and participation generating a collective knowledge and intelligence that
has much in common with the fan cultures studied by Henry Jenkins (2006), but
with a clearly enhanced educational purpose. In
Confronting the Challenges of
Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century
, media theorist Henry
Jenkins writes:
A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of
participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed
attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression,
the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered
conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new
form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which
will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace.
(Jenkins, 2007: 3)
Educators and critics tend to ask the wrong question when they assert that
Wikipedia is inaccurate, because this implies a conception of Wikipedia as a finished
product rather than a work in progress. Users can edit articles and monitor how
these articles have been altered. They can discuss and argue about the changes and
in so doing gain new skills, knowledge and understanding about the subject at hand,
politics and the media itself. This means that wiki articles are indeed open to
intellectual and other vandalism, but it also means that users may generate both
content and a sense of responsibility for maintaining the integrity of their contri-
butions, interests and concerns. In 2004, Wikipedia published its 500,000th article
and has continued to expand. As Weinberger (2002: 69) suggests, we ought to
embrace this new emergent way of looking and learning. The Web may be distracting
and open to abuse but, like the world, it is potentially so interesting that 'when set
free in a field of abundance, our hunger moves us from three meals a day to day-
long grazing'. In other words, we often can't leave it alone. Similarly, for Jenkins
(2007), developing the work of Pierre Levy (1997), wikis offer an important learning
environment whose processes and possibilities seem constitutive of a sustainable
education itself:
