The Amateur Overtaking The Professional
Social media is rapidly changing the way people communicate and share ideas. Rather than a static book or website that people merely read and absorb, they now have the power, in multiple ways, to talk, tweet, post, blog, or do a quite a number of other things in response. These powers used to be exclusive to the professional until recent achievements in our constant expansion of communication took hold. Academic disciplines in the form of classification by means of the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Classification System have fallen wayside to folksonomies much to the dismay of those in academia. The question remains however: Does the strengthening role of amateurs in social media have a negative impact on our( community)? The answer.. The rise of the amateur in the digital media realm does lead to a necessary devaluation of the professional not unlike the ideas of Karl Marx. The hierarchy is flattening to a Grassroots driven web community where money is decreasing as a factor and bullshit is being exposed.
The rise of the amateur is creating a grass-roots approach in which the community drives the movement of media. It is a non-traditional power structure, an upheaval against the status quo of only professional creation. Amateurs can participate immediately by merely logging into a number of social networking sites and sharing anything they would like to. Simplicity in many uploading processes has been achieved on websites like Facebook and YouTube. Not only the data itself but the metadata (data about data) is being produced by amateurs as well in the forms of comments and reviews. Designers and manufacturers can look at the responses and cater to the requests that they see or directly enable a participatory design scheme in which all stakeholders are actively involved to ensure that the product satisfies. On websites like Alltop that gather the most popular news stories from every website and organizes them on one page it is fellow readers, not editors, that are deeming what is most important and interesting. People cycle information through the web in this way at an incredible rate of speed that professionals could never keep up with. Anyone has been given the capacity to change the world, or to deter someone from buying a faulty camera. (mention mashups?..)
The professionals are scared, and for good reason. Charles Murray, a seasoned and well-known author, recently complained on the American Enterprise Institute blog that his contribution to the co-op page of the New York Times only earned him $75. Media platforms are beginning to recognize that there are many people who would be happy to produce articles, movies, and photographs and post them all over the internet for free. Many productions make up in character what they lose in professional editing techniques, such as the Bed Intruder song on YouTube. Experiments such as these are less restricted because millions of dollars in production costs are not lost when there is a fluke. Millions of videos are posted and some catch fire. No longer do amateurs pay for the privilege of enjoying professional content. The content is the currency. This does mean that many parties involved are losing money from these sources but there are ways to cash in. A huge part of the new social media is the tracking of what people want and selling them just that. Social networking creates friends, which in turn creates more business partners and customers for companies. Websites to aid with this are also being created, like Spreadfast. Spreadfast is a web-based software that tracks people’s views and interactions on companies pages or blog. This helps companies recognize what the most successful methods are for attracting more attention to their companies. Professional time and commitment still makes content more valuable and there is definitely still a place for it today. I’m not going to stop attending mind-blowing action films containing Batman realistically scaling buildings to sit at home and watch YouTube videos, and I speak on behalf of many more than myself.
The new social media is doing the reputable deed of exposing consumers to bullshit....
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AHHH morgan!!
ReplyDeleteI love it. GREAT JOB so far.. I need to keep reading ( I haven't finished completely reading but keep it up!