Week 2

Participatory Audience: Week 2 Blog

This week in class we discussed vastly about what it means to be a participatory audience. In today's society I found that participatory relies heavily with social media and the comment section. That's where a lot of the audience is received and understood. With this topic, I was thinking of all the comment sections that I have read and the unwanted comments that tend to appear. When we were discussing this topic this week, I thought of the unwanted participatory audience. I thought that it was important to address those who participate and only spread either misinformation or just overall negativity. That's where I thought of one of the questions that was asked in class:

What are some advantages and disadvantages of having a participatory audience?

I think that one of the disadvantages is the unwanted participatory audience. I was thinking of scrolling through my TikTok feed, and how there are more often than not, very negative comment sections that seem to be unwanted. However, I thought of a personal experience that I had. When I first went to college I worked in the service industry and could not stand by the "Customer is always right" motive. One day while scrolling through Facebook, I saw a meme about the customer being always right, despite the worker working there for almost 5 years. I thought it was funny and shared this meme, thinking that this would allow for others who were my age and experienced this would have a good laugh as well. Boy was I wrong. My own grandmother turned on me, commenting how she should be viewed as always right, etc. I personally do not like any conflict displayed on my social media because that's not what I stand for, and I had to delete the entire post despite many other comments being whole-hearted and funny. I couldn't just delete my grandmother's comment because she would just repost her original comment. I think that this experience has stuck with me because it is almost an all or nothing audience. You cannot choose to only have one side of the audience.