Mass Amateurization (Rhesa Mae Bernal)

When I interned for a small magazine over the summer, I realized that instead of getting a story straight-on from the source. Instead of reporting directly, I felt like it was just another story that gained popularity through other news outlets. Mass Amateurization is like that. From Clay Shirky's from, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” he points out that a boy, who was loving the Dave Barry popular column, was helping the column’s popularity by piracing. Shirky mentions in his article that newspapers haven’t been blindsided by the upcoming fad of the internet, but instead, they were expecting it. What they didn’t expect was how fast the internet took over that their side projects of trying to save the newspaper business didn’t work out. He talks about how many people try to revamp the consumption of newspapers, but it has failed miserably. For example, Shirky points out that the idea of information being “walled up” isn’t enchanting at all. People want their news, and the more they gained from the internet, the more they were willing to go around the walls.

          

         Media publishing and consumption has changed drastically from this due to the consumption and publishing of the internet as a whole. Nowadays, you can get news from anywhere. WorldStarHipHop is a video-based type of news that has people randomly recording fights that would break out randomly. How is this news? Sometimes, the more shared the WorldStarHipHop video is, the more it becomes news because of how viral it is. That’s when the viral fighting video website became a phenomenon. Now, they’re trying to report real news like how Buzzfeed became famous for their cat videos and now they’re a news outlet with their famous listicles and relatable lingo.

WorldStarHipHop was famous for their fights

            The clown phenomenon has become newsworthy because people have been taking pictures of these clowns that would appear out of nowhere. Not reporters, people have been taking pictures and posting PSAs on their Facebooks and Twitters. It stopped being a simple whisper throughout the news world because of the civilians who have been reporting more and more sightings that have been terrifying. There are videos about clowns running up to them or clowns being beat up by groups of people who are not willing to deal with it.

Civilians have been reporting clown sightings by taking videos and pictures.

            WikiLeaks has been leaking news for a while now and reporters have been getting information for their stories from there from time to time especially now with all the new Clinton drama that they have caused with more leaked e-mails.

Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks, released another batch of Clinton E-mails.

            Jenkin’s “Why Heather Can Write” may have been written a couple of years ago, but it still rings true today. Heather had started a J.K. Rowling Harry Potter fanfiction web-based newspaper site, and it has blown up. I can’t tell you how many times a friend has come up to me and made jokes about how if they were going to be a famous writer that they wouldn’t be thanking the Nobel Peace Prize winner of Literature. Instead, they would be thanking username HarryPotterLover4Life for their amazing fanfiction and how their love for Dumbledore has inspired them to get where they are.

            

         What is the future for media professionals? David Carr said it best, “The ability to do journalism, to reach audiences, has never been better. I like your odds. I do.” Yes, it’s very threatening for journalism students who want to make it big as a journalist, but I believe that, with all this media consumption that we have at our disposal, is a tool that we can use to share news all over the world. Shirky even pointed out that newspapers, back in the day, were very expensive to make. He even talked about if the people were questioning the advancement of media, it’s because they are willing to lie to themselves about how the newspaper business is dead.

          

               “And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.”

           

         Shirky stated, “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Letting a kid copy and paste news is how news spread around in the first place. I do believe that there needs to be structure and decorum when it comes to the details of copyright and such, but when it comes to knowing about something, shouldn’t it start from the developing tools of media instead of people having to climb up walls in order to get their news?

Works Cited:

[1] Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.                                           New York:  Penguin, 2008. Print.

[2] Jenkins, Henry. "Why Heather Can Write." Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media 
            Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006. 173. Print. 

[3] Carr, David. "David Carr’s Last Word on Journalism, Aimed at Students." The New York Times. The New York Times, 15 Feb. 2015. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.