Participation

Participation is like a monument one passes every day—so routine, so common it’s hard to remember just why it is there, or what it memorializes. When we read a Wikipedia page, answer an Android phone, or log into Instagram, it is easy to, so to speak, walk past this monument. The experience of such mediated collectives, and the fact of their material existence, owes much to the keyword participation—to the many real hands and minds and hearts necessary to produce that image, that encyclopedia entry, that emotional experience of belonging. Even in a volume of digital keywords such