The Mass Amateurs - A New Class on Its Own

In the past the use of media was mainly used as a medium that allowed professional journalists and photographers to communicate with the masses. With the rise of the internet and other social media becoming more popularized among the public, particularly with the innovation of smart phones and social networking sites, we have all been able to shape the media in our own unique way, whether that is by uploading photos on Facebook or writing a new blog entry on Tumblr. The internet and social networking sites has revolutionized the way we express ourselves and communicate with each other. We have all become a part of a new class—the mass amateurs.

As Clay Shirky states in Everyone Is a Media Outlet, this rise of mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities. A new wave of journalists and photographers has emerged—us, the masses. Growing up in this new generation of mass amateurization, with my first experience as a blogger on Xanga, I was able to convey my thoughts on anything in this weblog. My friends and I used Xanga as a platform to communicate with each other online by constantly updating our blogs like journal entries. To us Xanga was much like the present day Facebook, in its startup stage, but in blog and journal entry format.

While I was abroad in Shanghai, Xanga became one of the primary sources that kept me in touch with my friends and family back in New York City. In the following days of the 2003 New York City blackout, after the energy was restored, I was able to read the blog entries of friends who had experienced the blackout. I was also able to blog about my first encounter with a typhoon in Shanghai, which inundated many of the city’s streets and districts. Despite the flood, my parents still insisted that I go outside and throw out the trash in knee-deep water. Being able to blog about experiencing a typhoon gave blogging a whole new twist. I actually felt that surge of adrenaline as I typed up that blog entry. Stunt journalism has nothing on this!

As Shirky argues anyone in the developed world can publish anything anytime, and the instant it is published, it is globally available and readily findable (online). Being able to experience the typhoon firsthand, already granted me journalistic privilege in a sense. I didn’t need to be a media professional to blog about my experience. In fact, anyone who had been through the typhoon in Shanghai had the same credibility as an on-site journalist or reporter did, to be able to blog about their experience. With this case in point, my publisher was Xanga and my subscribers or readers were my friends and the rest of the Xanga community. Everyone is indeed a media outlet because we all have the same capabilities as media professionals do by being able to capture anything on site with our cell phone cameras and other technological devices if we are at the scene at the right place and time. It is just merely the difference in the quality of the footage and overall presentation that separates the masses and media professionals. The video footage coming from the cell phone of a regular person most certainly cannot be compared to the clarity of video footage that comes from a professional video camera carried out by a professional cameraman.

In regards to the future of media professionals, they will somehow be able to find quicker methods of getting the story and arriving on site at the scene before eyewitnesses can present footage to the bigger media channels. Perhaps the future of the news will consist of satellite images zooming in on certain locations, resembling that of the zoom in component on Google Maps. Whatever the future of media professionals may be, they will certainly rely on the communication that the masses send out, whether that is through Twitter, Facebook, and video footage from a cell phone or any other source of cutting edge media.