When Participatory Culture Attacks, Response to MC Guffee, "Henry Jenkins... returns"

Participatory culture can be a wonderful thing. Through the Internet, it allows people from around the world to connect with each other over something they love, as Jenkins writes, using “the shared framework of popular culture” (457).  The Internet offers a certain degree of anonymity that face-to-face interactions don’t. Users can often say whatever they want with little to no repercussions. They can freely say things that they wouldn’t think of saying in real life. The combination of anonymity and an audience can often bring out the worst in people. 

The Jackson Katz Yik Yak incident is just one example. Another example of participatory culture gone wrong can be seen with the backlash against feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian runs a YouTube channel called Feminist Frequency where she critiques popular culture from a feminist perspective, and recently she has been making a series of videos dedicated to deconstructing sexist tropes in video games. As soon as she announced this series, the angrier members of the gaming community found a common enemy. Many users across the Internet (but mostly from 4chan, the hotbed of scumbag Internet activity) banded together to barrage Sarkeesian with threats and hate messages. They’ve dehumanized her by viewing her as a sort of big scary villain hell-bent on destroying video games, and they’ve cast themselves as the heroes. The anonymity of the Internet has allowed them to act this way because they know they won’t face any repercussions.