What are the conditions for online participation in culture?

There is only a small number of studies available that focus on the conditions for this kind of engagement, as online participation in culture represents merely a small area of research. As in other areas there may be a negative correlation between the age of users and their level of online engagement. In other words: The younger the users, the more likely that they are to be culturally engaged on the Net (Grace-Farfaglia et al., 2006; Ho et al., 2008). This is not least due to the fact that younger users exhibit a higher level of experience and subjective perception of their own competency (Ryu et al., 2009).

Participation in the area of culture is often associated with a significant degree of complexity. For instance, posting a video involves the individual stages of shooting, cutting, encoding, saving and sharing (Ryu et al., 2009). What this requires lends credence to the assumption that this area will manifest a particularly distinct „participation divide“ (Ho et al., 2008; Götzenbrucker & Franz, 2010). As mentioned earlier, the frequency of participation is spread according to the power law distribution. A few very active users dominate what goes on.

The underlying social motives behind use itself is an important driver within cultural participation. For instance, the more a user is integrated within an online community, the greater the likelihood of active participation. This may be due to encouragement through interaction with other users, or also peer pressure (Ryu et al., 2009). Age may be an influential factor here, also. Older users are less inclined to communicate creatively as they tend to be less involved and have fewer social contacts online (Ryu et al., 2009).

Cultural drivers of online participation in culture were also identified: In this, it became apparent that different national cultures exhibit different levels of openness toward a range of participation forms (Grace-Farfaglia et al., 2006). The particularly high degree of activity observed among minority groups is also linked partially to cultural motives, suggesting that social marginalisation makes a group more ideologically charged and leads to a greater effort invested in communication and mobilisation (Farrell, 2011). However, this does require the users to possess the necessary skills (Götzenbrucker & Franz, 2010).