Participation and media

Abstract

Participation is a highly fluid and contested notion, or a concept that can be called – following Laclau and Mouffe (1985) – an empty signifier. In practice, this means that – as Pateman (1970: 1) puts it – ‘the widespread use of the term [...] has tended to mean that any precise, meaningful content has almost disappeared; “participation” is used to refer to a wide variety of different situations by different people’. It is tempting to see this process of the emptying of the signifier participation as a neutral event or as an accident of history. A more critical analysis shows that this is actually an ideological process, which aims (or threatens) to remove the more radical meanings from the concept of participation. Attempts to counter this softening-down of (the signifier) participation have been based on the construction of dichotomized systems of meaning. In these dichotomies, specific forms of participation are described as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’, while other forms are described as ‘fake’ and ‘pseudo’. In the field of so-called political participation, for example, Verba (1961: 220–221) points to the existence of ‘pseudo-participation’, in which the emphasis is not on creating a situation in which participation is possible, but on creating the feeling that participation is possible. An alternative name, which is among others used by Strauss (1998: 18), is ‘manipulative participation’ [1]. An example of an author working within the tradition of participatory communication who uses terms as ‘genuine’ and ‘authentic participation’ is Servaes. In his Communication for development (1999), he writes that this ‘real’ form of participation has to be seen as participation ‘[that] directly addresses power and its distribution in society. It touches the very core of power relationships’ (Servaes, 1999: 198; my emphasis). Moreover, this shows how crucial power is to the definition of participation, as is also emphasized by White (1994: 17):