Chinwe A. Onuoha
Convergence
October 16, 2014
The Power of Mass
Amateurization In Today’s Media Landscape
Before
bad reality television shows and Shonda Thursdays, newspapers and radios served
as a major source of communication for Americans, but with the Internet, people
are able to access information quicker, while disseminating ground breaking
news on Twitter –which has become a news media escape for people who couldn't
be bothered with watching a minute of Eyewitness
News or reading a column in The Star
Ledger.
Nowadays, people
are more interested in receiving their news at a click of a button, but most
importantly, at their own expense. With smart phones, iPads, tablets and other
small, portable devices, people are able to publish any kind of information
that they want, but the millions of people who will share, tweet or repost it,
are at risk because they don’t really know whether the information that they
are reading is accurate or objective.
Moreover, with
todays media landscape growing, the power of mass amateurization is in the
hands of anyone who has access to the Internet –which, in return, could turn
the field of journalism into a playground filled with amateurs that are
pretending to be something that they aren’t; leaving the professionals sitting
idly, wondering if they made it to the right profession.
In
chapter three of Clay Shirky’s book Here
Comes Everybody, he states the consequences of this new form of media being
accessible to everyone. “When reproduction distribution, and categorization
were all difficult, as they were for the last five hundred years, we needed
professionals to undertake those jobs, and we properly venerated those people
for the service they performed. Now those tasks are simpler, and the earlier
roles have in many cases become optional, and are sometimes obstacles to direct
access, often putting the providers of the older service at odds with their
erstwhile patrons,” (Shirky, 78).
As a result of
those changes, the blogs that have been published on the Internet, “are not
merely alternate sites of publishing; they are alternatives to publishing
itself in the sense of publishers as a minority and professional class. In the
same way, you do not have to be a professional driver to drive; you no longer
have to be a professional publisher to publish. Mass amateurization is a result
of the radical spread of expressive capabilities, (Shirky, 66).
This
new shift in journalism (that is mass amateurization) has a way of opening a
creative space for people to use certain tools on the web to develop a media
landscape that seemed far beyond what anyone could have ever imagined. The same
case is true when children read fiction stories and fan fiction, such as Harry Potter. There is this new world
that develops for the child, which challenges the role of media literacy, in
terms of how television programs are produced and the way it is interpreted.
However, as Henry Jenkins explains that “across this book, we have identified a
number –the ability to pool knowledge with others in a collaborative
enterprise, the ability to make connections across scattered pieces of
information, the ability to circulate what you create via Internet so that it
can be shared with others (again as in fan cinema),” (Jenkins, 185).
Works Cited
1. Jenkins, Henry. "Why Heather Can Write." Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Print.
2. Shirky, Clay. “Everyone Is a Media Outlet.” Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
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