Introduction

This collection offers a critical exploration of participatory media cultures and addresses the lived experiences of users within South and Southern African contexts. Despite the expanding body of research on our social media usage, local audiences and their relationships to texts and each other often remain underexplored. By examining how interpretive communities and online communities of practice engage with and reshape digital cultures, we shift attention to the framework of participatory culture that moves focus from media industries to users themselves: their creative practices, collaborations, and everyday digital labour. This theoretical orientation enables the contributors to challenge conventional understandings of cultural consumption and production through qualitative inquiry and user perspectives, thereby recognising audiences not as passive recipients but as co-creators of meaning, identity, and socio-political discourse.