#massamateurization

“Mass amateurization refers to the capabilities that new forms of media have given to non-professionals and the ways in which those non-professionals have applied those capabilities in order to create and distribute content and solve problems.” Amateur by definition is someone who is engaged with something without payment and also unprofessional. These amateurs are  operating without financial motive create something extremely valuable, but don't get it confused with being unskillful. What Clay Shirky is saying by mass amateurization is that with social media growing and pop culture being such a big part of our lives today soon all of social media and where we get our news is going to be dependent.

Society now "replaces a previous professional function." Shirky states that the greatest change in intellectual landscape was invention of printing press which made made reading and writing valuable to a society as a whole. However this stopped this trait as being useful as a profession. In Clay Shirky's Everyone is a media outlet, he states “the scribe was the only bulwark against great intellectual loss... His function was indispensable, and his skills were irreplaceable” (Shirky, 67) Until everyone learned how to do it, so the job to do it isn't there anymore, thanks to mass amateurization and printing press started this idea which dates back to the 1400s.

Mass amateurization is great for collaboration and support to your community. “Amateurization is most often associated with Web 2.0 technologies, which include the rise of blogs and citizen journalism, photo and video-sharing services such as Flickr and YouTube, user-generated wikis like Wikipedia, and distributed accommodation services such as Airbnb.” This can become a problem when instead of paying someone to fix your computer you can easily look on forums for people who have the same problem and through social media we help each other out. We also begin to publish our own projects, with videos and photos on our smart phones! It is so easy and cheap to do that we don't need someone to do it for us, we can do it by ourselves.

"Why Heather Can Write" by Jenkins to me is an awesome story about a girl who wrote fan-fiction that simulates citizen journalism and starts her own online paper called The Daily Prophet. "Teachers sometimes complain that popular culture competes for the attention of their students, a claim that starts from the assumption that what kids learn from media is less valuable than what schools teach." But this article shows that through mass amateurization kids can learn from each other especially since they are more engaged in something they care about and work hard on than reading something in school they are not interested in at all.

We are all not professionals but we can update a blog and with our ideologies and take photos and post them on instagram, even post videos on youtube to market ourselves that is as easy as clicking a button. We use tools such as hashtags (**note, I hashtagged the title**) to talk amongst each other to become independent. Why Heather Can Write is just an example of how mass amateurization is growing and there are many stories just like that out there.