User participation culture was already analyzed and critiqued by 1970s postmodern theorists

Evidence

Oddly, Kirby labels these texts “pseudo-modernist”, arguing that this “pseudo-modernism” has now superseded postmodernism. Kirby’s understanding of postmodernism suffers from being exclusively derived from literary studies, which has defined postmodernism narrowly, in terms of a set of reflexive strategies based around so-called “meta-fictions” such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). But far from marking a move beyond postmodernism, the shift from creator to recipient, from producer to consumer, that Kirby describes is exactly what the most acute theorists of postmodernism — Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson — had long ago got to grips with. Reading Baudrillard’s texts from the 1970s, with their extended discussions of reality TV and the “referendum mode”, is to confront analyses that now seem preternaturally prescient. What has been made obsolete is not Baudrillard and Jameson’s mordant anticipations of the monotony that would ensue in the name of viewer and consumer “involvement”, but those positions which claimed that eroding the privilege of the author and the artist carries a subversive charge. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1224

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in illusions of participation/agency — resonates with the Bernard Bailyn note that ‘involvement’ talk in the name of the masses was anticipated and drained of subversive charge decades ago.