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Genres of “Amateur” Content Production
As well as writing up my Masters thesis, I’m putting together PhD proposals (targeted to the research interests of various universities) on the topic of vernacular creativity and new media – the current version is here if anyone is interested. In trying to work out the areas I might select as case studies, I’m putting […]
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The Amateur in History
Alex from Relevant History provides a nice counterweight to all the mass amateurisation hoopla, reminding us of what Wimbledon tennis commentators never forgot : The notion that being a ‘professional’ is a good thing, and that professionals know more than amateurs, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the mid-1800s, being a ‘professional’ meant that you […]
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Democratising Technologies?
A landmark Clay Shirky piece that I’ve just caught up with – in a nutshell, he argues that the widespread adoption of ICTs has made the concept of (media) consumers nonsensical. It rests on some problematic “before” assumptions about media audiences, making the “after” picture even more vibrant – i.e. that we were a passive […]
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Link Dump: Democratization of Technologies etc.
As my field of interest narrows again in response to the increasingly urgent requirement that I come up with a solid PhD proposal, I’ve been looking for blogs with a similar focus to what mine will be (soon, I hope). Here’s todays harvest. Corante.com is a handy hub for several blogs hooked into the whole […]
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Jenny Everywhere
From the My Favourite Things Department… A bunch of creative people have done something very cool with Tom Coates’ Open Source Comicbook Character meme (see here for the collaboration behind it all). The result is Jenny Everywhere, aka The Shifter: She’s open source! She’s multidimensional! That’s right, the character of Jenny Everywhere may be used […]
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Cultural Value in the Age of “Mass Amateurisation”
Tom Coates’ insightful and focused article “Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of (Nearly) Everything“, and the followup by Tom of bbCity, have come at just the right time for me. For the last few weeks I have posted several short pieces on the social impacts of cultural profileration and the democratization of creative technologies, mostly […]
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Gatekeeping the Fruity Loops Revolution
Been thinking about the links between the new definitions of creativity, especially how creativity is increasingly tied up with technological innovation. At the same time the technologies used in creative production are becoming cheaper, easier to use, widely available to “ordinary” consumers. I’ve started to notice the strategies highly specialised areas of producers (the professionals) […]
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Invisible Artworlds
Howie Becker has proposed that we need to study “amateur” cultural producers in the same way (high) cultural sociologists already do: that is, as participants in art worlds that interact with other art worlds (e.g. co-determinous relationship between amateur, avant-garde, and professional systems of practice). The full article, written in his usual and somewhat brilliant […]