The previous chapters described a participatory culture unfolding through user activities that increasingly affect the production and distribution of media texts and software. This participatory culture is part of a media practice intrinsically affected by the qualities of related technology. Simultaneously promoted and represented in a popular discourse on social progress through technological advancement, this cultural practice manifests itself as an extension of established production routines of media texts and consumer goods. As explicit participation, it shows an active involvement of users in co-producing, appropriating and changing media texts and software-based products of the established industries or even independently creating media content and applications outside the industry's production channels. In this process, corporate producers are confronted with users who deliberately change the original design and develop software-based products further. Additionally, the bypassing of traditional distribution channels for media content through Internet applications has been a serious challenge for industries whose business model explicitly revolves around the control of distribution. I have labelled this process an extension of the cultural industries, where production and distribution are extended into the realm of the user. But this extension appears to be twofold: on one hand, the quality of the new technologies described in chapter 3 constituted an extension of production and distribution channels into the realm of the user, but on the other hand, the culture industries started to extend themselves into users’ media practices by integrating user activities into new platforms and services. This ambivalent quality of media practices and technology is also recognizable in the accompanying discourse. While it hastily started out to celebrate the participatory potential of users who were now seen as media producers, liberated from the top-down culture industries, the industries’ extension as platform providers for user-generated content is now often criticized as an exploitation of free labour. And indeed, the twofold meaning of the extension of the cultural industries constitutes dynamic interactions between corporate producers and user collectives that raise issues of socio-political quality.

The following chapter conceptualizes participatory culture as an extension of the cultural industries. It deliberately refers to the critical connotation of culture industry as formulated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, but it does not strive for a Marxist understanding of participation.