Global and local in the unconventional use of media in advertising.

The concept of participation is today used in a variety of fields and claims a wide range of meanings. Participatory experiences today concern marketing communications, published media, software design, urban planning, architecture and landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design and so on. In all these fields, producers or brands, companies or “advertisers”, have to negotiate for the consumer's attention. If understood as a particular level of social reality, interdependent and interpenetrating with the level of interaction of the social system, such experiences can be traced to a “participatory culture”: a culture in which individuals as social actors does not act as consumers only, but also act, proactively, as publishers, contributors or producers. The objective of the present study is to see if this “participatory culture”, often greeted whit optimism as the end of the liability of the hetero-directed consumer, has still to do with democratic and inclusive processes or indicates new, maybe unclear or not yet theorized, processes. We will try to clarify what means participation and “participatory culture” today and, also through some basic sociological concepts such as field and border, cooperation and conflict and game theory, we will try to observe the shape and the dynamics that characterize recent forms of participation that linked the world of production with the world of consumption in the Web 2.0 society in order to highlight any possible internal contradiction.