Legacy of Political Modernism

Michael Newman and Ira Wagman have some useful questions while reading Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture. Michael writes,

Jenkins's examples are all of spectators becoming active in the co-creation of media. I too am excited by this activity, but I am not totally comfortable with the unambiguous positive moral valence this is given. It suggests that the comparative passivity of non-co-creating viewers is a less worthy mode of engagement and prescribes a certain kind of viewing activity as preferable. I'm sure Jenkins doesn't mean to be prescriptive in this way, but this is the implication I draw from the way he stakes his position.

I wonder in turn how much of the positive moral valence owes to strains of political modernism which did make explicit and implicit prescriptive claims about which kinds of spectatorship were preferable.