Christopher Kelty’s broad-minded and brilliant essay on participation is a welcomed participant in the Digital Keywords volume. It both intellectual broadens as well as analytically tightens the contemporary understanding of that classic concept and near constant discussion of it online. Marshaling together insights ranging from Parmenides to Polanyi, he offers insights such as how participation proves a boundary function, excluding at the same time it constitutes community, democracy, and sharing, three towering keywords covered elsewhere in the volume by Rosemary Avance, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and Nicholas A. John.
If, as Kelty clarifies, to participate is to belong but not always voluntarily, what does it mean to participate in public life?
This comment may have been adapted from the introduction to Benjamin Peters’ Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture. 25% discount code in 2016: P06197
Excerpted from Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture by Benjamin J. Peters, ed. © 2016 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.