As social media and the Internet become more prominent in our lives, we are seeing a big change when it comes to who publishes content for the world to see. Publishing and producing content used to be reserved for the professionals who had credibility and training, but now things have changed. If someone has access to a computer and the Internet, they can become authors, videographers, critics, you name it.
In Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, Shirky talks about anyone being able to create content and the idea of “mass amateurization.” The amateurs that Shirky is referring to are the people that post whatever they like on the Internet. Shirky is trying to point out that the amount of amateur content creators is high because of the resources that are available to us now. Before, the people that had the resources to publish and have an audience had titles, experience, and now only Internet access is required. In “Publish, Then Filter”(Shirky, 81) Shirky begins by including some excerpts he found online from“mass amateurs.” Each of these paragraphs contain various grammatical errors, were posted on social media websites, and were not posted to inform the public of important news, but instead to update their friends or followers of their day and personal lives.
The traditional way of publishing is not the norm when it comes the Internet. There are no tiers of editors, or newsrooms, or meetings where a team of journalists decide what is news and what isn’t. Now the only things that are needed is a person who is willing to write and a computer.
It appears as though “mass amateurs” are more prominent at the moment. Anyone with an opinion can become a writer now and that is a bit troubling. This can affect the way that news is discussed and distributed. Not only can everyone comment about the news, they can also create it. It is increasingly harder to find credible sources or to believe in something if it does not have the name of a well-known publisher attached to it. I have seen many people on Facebook link to an article that is not credible, but because it is on the Internet they may be inclined to believe that it is true. Sometimes I even see them post an article by The Onion and they will believe it because they are unaware that it is all parody on actual news. I guess they just believed that when they said they were “America’s Finest News Source.”
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| The Onion's homepage on October 13, 2016. "America's Finest News Source." The latin phrase "tu stultus es" seen on the top right corner translates to "you are an idiot." |
In other cases there is footage of an incident caught on a cellphone camera by a random person on the street and that picture or video can be used as a major tool to help a story. Before the job of capturing important instances were reserved for photographers and photojournalists, but that has changed.
The outcome of the “mass amateur” is that it does not filter on what gets published. Shirky writes, “it is easy to conclude that, while the old world of scarcity may had some disadvantages, it spared us the worst of amateur production.” (Shirky, 83) This means that before the published content was professional and had a real purpose, was formatted correctly and had very little to no errors. There were certain standards that content had to meet to get published, but now anything and everything can get a chance to be seen by the masses. The work of professionals had different expectations and criteria, and there work went through a different process than that of the amateur. Shirky mentions that before professionals were “gatekeepers” because they were “simultaneously providing and controlling access to information, entertainment, communication, or other ephemeral goods.” (Shirky, 57) Now, these gatekeepers are rare and this causes posts to have less quality and substance.
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| This shows the difference between the old and new media. Before the news was distributed by professionals, and now anyone can provide news and media. |
A difference between the old way of publishing and the new is that there is no need to ask for permission and that it is “more favorable to innovative uses, because they are considerably more flexible than our old ones”(Shirky, 77). In the new age, posting is almost always free and you do not need anyone’s money to be able to publish what you desire. Shirky points this out by saying that before the media relied on others to be able to stay in business and because of this you needed to publish what they wanted you to publish. In the new way of publishing “one may propose and explore new models of communication and coordination without needing to get anyone’s permissions first.” (Shirky, 77)
Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, includes a story about a girl, Heather Lawver, who created a website where anyone and everyone were able write Harry Potter fan fiction. The website known as The Daily Prophet was very successful and it created a community of Harry Potter loving amateur authors. The majority of the “authors” were kids who typically do not have voices or would not be taken seriously as authors in any other case. The authors of the fan fiction formed a part of a community were their work was seen as professional. Unlike other work that was in the Internet, the work of some of the Harry Potter fan fiction wen through some editing process, or “beta reading.” (Jenkins, 188) These jobs were typically left to the professionals, but were mostly forgotten by some Internet content creators. This adds to the aspect of the amateur authors because it is similar to some of the process that professional authors go through.
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| A screenshot of the Daily Prophet in 2002. This was obtained from Lawver's new website Heather's Show |
The future media professionals need to be able to do more than just write. They need to be able to get the attention of the readers who posses short attention spans, know how to use interactive media, and be very available and be social media savvy. As John V. Pavlik and Shawn McIntosh say in their book Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication that journalists need to be “competent, if not necessarily expert, with the range of tools in the digital toolkit.” (Pavlik McIntosh, 251) It is no longer enough that you are a good writer; you must be able to have experience in many other fields as well. Media professionals have to be able to be an entire team of media experts all by yourself.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin Group, 2008. Print.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print.
Pavlik, John V. and Shawn McIntosh. Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Communication. New York: Oxford University Press, Print.
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