Chapter 12: Consumers or Producers of Democracy: Moving Civic Education From the Information to the Empowerment Age

“Once upon a time” represents my first memory of what now characterizes participatory media—sharing, socializing, content generation, and user agency, all used to describe participatory media, aptly describe storytelling. A storyteller or medium addresses a group, sharing stories that provide insight into the group’s history and traditions. Each speaker uses techniques that serve to personalize the story, while maintaining its overall integrity. In turn, each person in the group while listening to the story is creating mental images and thus making the story their own. Storytelling builds a sense of community since the tales that are passed on remind each person of their shared legacy. In this sense participatory media is as old as the first storyteller, whose very anonymous nature illustrates how anyone can become a storyteller. Technologies, such as the telephone came to redefine an essential aspect of storytelling, that is, communication, while the advent of radio redefined another element, that is, information. Later, technologies, such as movies and television gradually separated participation from the media. However, this changed when the Apple Company caught the world by surprise with the 1984 Super Bowl commercial for the Macintosh (Mac) computer.