When new and old forms of participation comes together [Elektronisk resurs]

• What happens when new forms of participation through social media shall cooperate with older forms of participation? A question which has arisen and created debate when previously non mediated cultural forms, as live concerts or live theater, now has to share room with the public own mediated participation. The public has in these kinds of scenarios transformed to a much more active player in the process of participation.The main focus for my PhD study is too shed light on how cultural expressions, as in live theater, can be used to create meetings in the Swedish countryside and how these cultural meeting as a communicational process appears. The project can thereby be described as exploratory and empirical data driven. To study cultural meetings, I follow a theater concept which is called Theater to the village where I do observations on one of theirs performance on tour. Besides observation, supplementary interviews and observation of the theater group's use of social media are done. Theater as a form of communication to create increased participation and community building are today a recognized method in the development communication practice for rural development. Some of the premises today for rural development are to create an increased participation in the local community and community building. Through the residents own participation in matters concerning their own experiences, is the idea that the residents thereby can make their own decisions and action for improvement in the local community. In light of this, we can see theater for development been developed as a way to create improvement in cultural, social, political and economically questions by creating participation (Kamlongera, 2005). Some of the theaters strength is its communicative abilities to create closeness and its possibility to blurring the gap between the transmitter and the receiver. One example of that can we see in Augusto Boals Theater of the oppressed (Boal, 2006).Theater can be seen to have a unique ability as a medium to create a feeling of a Here and Now. According to Walter Benjamin it is the meeting between individual and art in the room and the time which creates its unikum (Benjamin, 2008). The theaters capacity to a Here and Now experience seems in my study to increase the communicative participation and the ability to create interaction between people. But, this interaction and the way people is meeting each other appears to be under a change. Just as Benjamin saw that theater as a form was changing in that it became medialized into a metamorphosis and became film in the 1930s (Benjamin, 2008), does it seem that a similar change can be seen in the meeting between theater as a communicative practice and the public’s medialization of this through social media. 

Ämnesord

Social Sciences  (hsv)

Media and Communications  (hsv)

Communication Studies  (hsv)

Samhällsvetenskap  (hsv)

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap  (hsv)

Kommunikationsvetenskap  (hsv)

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap  (ltu)

Media and Communication Science.  (ltu)

Indexterm och SAB-rubrik

Other social sciences - Media and communication studies

Övrig samhällsvetenskap - Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap