The BBC’s Video Nation as a Participatory Media Practice

Abstract

The Video Nation project is one of the BBC’s recent major contributions to stimulating audience participation within mainstream media. This project (cl)aims to maintain a balanced power relationship between participants and members of the production team. Despite its transformation from a television setting to a web-based ‘online community and archive’ (although Video Nation partially returned to television in 2003), this project still has the ambition to give people the opportunity to represent themselves and their daily life. At the same time, it signifies the multilayered culture of ‘ordinary people’ and the cultural diversity within the British nation. The analysis illustrates the complex nature of audience participation in the mainstream media as, in contrast to community media, it becomes necessary to find and maintain an equal power balance between participants and media professionals in a structurally-biased institutional context. The power play that is seen at work in a highly fluid and contingent context creates the need for constant negotiation and care in order to protect the vulnerable power equilibrium between media professionals and participants. Crucial in this process is the participatory attitude of the media professionals, whose identity is no longer solely built on being a gatekeeper and producer of content, but also on gate-opening and facilitating the creation of content.