Clay Shirky’s "Everyone is a Media Outlet" describes mass amateurization as the process by which a lot of ordinary people (the masses) obtain the tools and become fluent in using technologies that were once commonplace only to the professionals (the minority group) that utilized them. Ordinary people are learning how to use once-exclusive tools and cranking out products/creations that were once impossible to create. Some professions are seeing their ends due to this mass amateurization, laws are being created in response to it, and we are again entering that period of chaos.
For example, I am a Mac user (PC should just die) and I started toying around with the Final Cut Pro application on my computer. Before I knew it, I was downloading videos from the internet, dropping them into my workspace, cutting, pasting, adding transitions and filters, and even audio scrubbing until I reached my goal: a unique video that was made up of at least 4 other videos and still photos that had been manipulated until they were virtually unrecognizable. So does this make me a professional editor because I have a general knowledge of FCP and access to it whenever I please? No, because I am only semiskilled in editing, I’m not making money, and I have not made a career out of it. However, I belong to a growing class of amateur editors who have done the same thing.
In today’s society, given our literacy and incredible access to information, it is easy to learn new skills at an astounding speed, thus making it possible for your average Joe to pull off the task somewhat, if not completely, successfully. Shirky explains that the outcome of mass amateurization has led to the death of several professions, difficulties in interpreting law, and numerous issues about how to keep the professionals who once filled those positions with money in their pockets. It is impossible to have a professional class if everyone can perform the tasks themselves just as it is impossible to create loopholes if everyone could be potentially included in those loopholes (journalists can withhold sources of info, but what defines a journalist?). Shirky uses the example of the scribe; the printing press gave the ordinary person the means of obtaining a book, which motivated literacy, which in turn made them capable of writing. The person no longer needed a fortune to obtain or even publish a written work. Plus, the average person could even get the job done faster and more accurately with the printing press than would have been possible with a scribe. Thus, the profession died because it became a mass profession (oxymoronic).
Today we move at such a speed that it seems overwhelming to even attempt to digest all of the information around us. Anyone can pick up their camera phone and become a reporter (the person who filmed Neta dying at an protest created news almost effortlessly) just as any person can type on their blog and hit “publish.” Granted, this does not make you a professional, but it makes you capable of performing the task to a certain degree. According to Shirky, “…we want [education and competence] standards created and enforced by other members of the same profession…” (58.) Why? Because some professions require such a high level of skills, which is difficult in itself, thus only the minority of professionals are capable of performing their duty properly. Still, we cannot properly perform eye surgery by watching a tutorial on Youtube because the costs of equipment and the amount of training involved takes a lot of time and effort, but the masses can have a general understanding of how eye surgery works. Ease of access to information and resources has revolutionized our lives and the job market.
The future of the media professional, in my mind, is blurry at best. Perhaps the future of the media professional will be dictated by the path of technological advances, like so many other professions before it. Being a media professional is a relatively new field of work, but I don’t see it dying out like that of the scribe. Our world is too connected now to take a step backward. This profession is unique because almost anyone with even a mediocre level of media literacy can become a sender of messages.
No comments:
Post a Comment