Survival of the Fittest Media Professional

Clay Shirky presents mass amaturization as a "result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities.” Although mass professionalization would have been the natural term for this distribution of specialized skill, it would also have been an oxymoron; “A professional class implies a minority of members.” Shirky spends much of Everyone is a Media Outlet addressing the resistance to the "threat" of mass amaturization. “If everyone can do something,” he writes, “it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital.” Professionals instinctively work to protect their rights to an exclusive group of trained, competent workers and are slow to accept a change in their “ecosystem”. Shirky exemplifies this resistance with Transports Schiocchet Excursions (TSE), a French bus company that sued several cleaning women for replacing TSE with carpooling (Shirky, 2008).

Another example of the mass amaturization phenomenon is the calculator. Modern-day calculators have their origins in the 1820s; the first pocket calculator was distributed in Japan in 1970 (Ball and Flamm). Before it, anyone who studied mathematics needed to be able to reason out problems on his or her own. A student of trigonometry was required to actually understand how trig functions were calculated, and not just how to enter problems into a calculator. Likewise, a student of standard deviation actually had to create tables to analyze values.

(www.Ecalc.com)

It has become easier to compute without understanding the theory behind computations. Although calculators have facilitated the rise of amateur mathematicians, they have also assisted professional mathematicians. Professionals and semi-professionals remain unique because they understand how calculators work, and they even benefit from the calculator’s simplicity; they are now able to bypass mistake-ridden calculations and spend more of their lifetimes constructing theory.

Like a transportation company and a mathematician, a media professional can view mass amateurization in two ways; (s)he can either fight the proliferation of his/her skill or (s)he can embrace it. If (s)he does the former, (s)he will have to spread his/her message through new media so that (s)he is recognized, thereby “undermin[ing] the message” with the medium (Shirky, 2008). If (s)he does the latter, (s)he will use mass amaturazation to widen his/her source pool and his business. Most media professionals will choose the latter path. They will agree that “tools don’t get sociologically interesting until they get technologically boring” (Shirky, 2009). The professionals that don’t adapt will be left behind and forgotten, almost following the principal of Darwinian evolution.

Shirky points out that we are living through “the largest increase in expressive capability in human history,” meaning that today’s mass amaturization, largely facilitated by the internet, is unlike that of the scribes, transportation companies, and mathematicians of the past (Shirky, 2009). Media professionals may not react in a clear-cut way. For now, most are accepting the internet as a necessary informational and business tool, but they are also attempting to preserve the old media that remains largely independent of amateurs.

References

Ball, Guy and Bruce Flamm. The History of Pocket Electronic Calculators. 1996. Vintage Calculators. 3 August 2010 .

Shirky, Clay. Clay Shirky: How social media can make history. June 2009. 3 August 2010 .

Shirky, Clay. "Everyone Is A Media Outlet." Here Comes Everybody. Penguin Press HC, 2008. 55-80.

Starr, Linda. Educators Battle Over Calculator Use: Both Sides Claim Casualties. 2002. 3 August 2010 .