A Participatory (Social) Media Culture

While reading through Joost Raessens' Computer Games as Participatory Media Culture (2005) two concepts of the Participatory Media Culture Model as being quite relatable to Social Media. Similar to Computer Games Social Media has the characteristics of both "virtuality" and "interactivity".
Let me explain further...

Raessans' states that virtuality is "the possibility to simulate virtual worlds a gamer can explore" (2005) and while this defines the concept I believe that his highlighting of virtuality as "an event or entity that is real in effect but not in fact" (Heim, 1993, as cited in Raessan, 2005) shows a great comparison to Social Media.
There are so many examples of this, Second life (you can explore that here), online shopping, the growing use of Avatar's (some more information about that here), but I find myself more familiar with Social Media Portals such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. On these sites a user can create a reality that is real for them online but not so much in "factual reality" (Raessan, 2005). For example, Instagram is abundant with what I would call Health Inspiration accounts; users who post photo's of their health food's, exercise regime and inspiring motivators for their followers (which are often in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands); and create a virtual society of people who are interested in similar things. The account holder, does not in fact have thousands of people watching them eat and exercise throughout their day in real life, but in effect, they do; on Social Media.

Source: http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/v/virtual_reality.asp 3/9/2013

Social Media can also be linked to the concept of interactivity. In my opinion, without interactivity most Social Media avenues would not operate. Interactivity means that the user has the ability to intervene with the representation itself in a meaningful way (Cameron as cited in Raessons, 2005) rather than simply viewing the message and doing or thinking nothing of it. This principle is how Twitter operates - with users posting information and others retweeting, replying and more, to intervene with the representation of the information, and eventually interact with the conclusion.

References

Raessens, J 2005, ‘Computer games as participatory media culture’, Handbook of computer game studies 2005, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 373-388