Intercultural Communication And Participatory Culture

The intercultural communication is a type of communication that aims to ex-change various information between different cultures and social groups. Usu-ally this term is used synonymously with the term cross-cultural communica-tion, however, both are considered to be almost the same field of study that explores how people with different cultural backgrounds interact . Various forms of intercultural communication have been known for hundreds of years, but today, in 21st century cross-cultural communication experiences dramativ changes. To talk more specifically, significant technological shifts altered the way people communicate with each other and gave a great push for redevel-opment of participatory culture.

Participatory culture is an opposite

Web 2.0 played an im-portant part in development of participatory culture: numerous web-sites with user-friendly interfaces offered lots of ordinary people to share all types of in-formation on well-known services such as Wikipedia, Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Photobucket, SoundCloud, Flickr, etc.

Participatory culture cannot be defined without following aspects:

1. quite low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement;

2. strong support for creating and sharing creations with others;

3. some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to

Usually, individuals use the English language as the main way of communication in the Internet (almost 26,3% of all users speak English in the global web).

The other aspect of participatory culture is relative freedom of content sharing: users encourage to repost, reblog, retweet images, videos and posts. Also, in 2001 American non-commercial organization “Creative Commons” came up with the range of several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons li-censes free of charge to the public, so people around the world can communi-cate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators .

Participatory culture is divided into some segments such as:

1. affiliations which include memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centred around various forms of media, such as Facebook, MySpace, message boards, metagaming, or game clans;

2. expressions which means producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, arts, fan videos, fan fiction, zines;

3. collaborative problem-solving – formal and informal completing tasks and develop new knowledge, for example through Wikipedia, alternative reality