Illustrated with the case of Pharrell William’s global hit Happy and its life on the internet, this paper looks into how audience participation can be scripted and how scripted forms of participation can morph. Positioned in participatory culture studies, originating from cultural and media studies, this paper proposes a perspective inspired by actor-network theory that highlights the script entail in planned participation and the ways in which this script may sometimes be followed and sometimes also be used as a repertoire to improvise over. Based in empirical examples from Happy the paper outlines four ways of making audiences participate: as cast in well-defined productions, as interactive audience participating by clicking, liking and commenting, as crew conducing a set assignment in a larger production, and as re-producers making their own versions of an original format. With these four forms participation, the paper suggests seeing participatory culture as a multiple and on-going phenomenon where planners aim to configure users and users contribute with re-configurations that planners may take up.
Unblackboxing production. What media studies can learn from actor-network theory