Mass Amateurization: The Media, and The World, Is In Our Hands

Mass amateurization is a term coined by Clay Shirky, who addresses that in his book Here Comes Everybody. This refers to the new world of mass media, where pretty much everyone can play a part in it with the advances in technology and the internet. Especially with social media today, anyone with access to the Internet can have a role spreading what news and information they feel should be out there. He says that mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities (Shirky 66). One of the chapters of Shirky's book is pretty straight forward about people are present in this era where social media is prominent, everyone is a media outlet.

In my own experiences, I get a good portion of my news through Twitter and Facebook. Posts on those social media outlets are sometimes from official companies like CNN or The New York Times but a lot of it are from my friends or the average Joe who either share an article from on of the aforementioned companies or they simply post about how they feel about certain piece of news without sharing a link. Twitter and Facebook both have changed the layout of their site so that it's conducive to the spread of news which relies of amount of mentions a certain topic gets from everyone on there. And I think everyone sometimes gets their news this way.

Facebook's relatively recent addition of a trending news section on their desktop site.

Shirky says the outcome of this mass amateurization is that the basic link between newsworthiness and publication has been broken. Now news can break into the public consciousness without the usual news sites even knowing about it, and that sometimes leads to news outlets covering stories simply because it has already broken into public consciousness (64-65). He also writes that this has led to the change of the definition of news in the fact that news has become part of a communications ecosystem rather than just an institutional privilege (66).

But there are pros and cons to what Shirky refers to as "user-generated content." For example, the flooding of personal, diary-like publishing by teenagers on then-popular sites Xanga and MySpace (82). Everything is heard, or read, and unfortunately it's not all relevant to each person that reads it. "Much of what gets posted on any given day is in public but not for the public," Shirky says. (90). As consumers, Shirky says the term has now become a temporary behavior due the fact that consumers now have the ability to produce content ourselves, which is a pro in itself. In relation to Henry Jenkins' Why Heather Can Write, another pro is that the mass amateurization creates a sense of community between people all over the world simply through a hashtag, for example. Just like the common ground that these Harry Potter fan fiction writers were on, social media users connect with each other through a common cause.

It's hard to see what the future of the media professional will be. They're still everywhere on tv and major news outlets. But I can definitely imagine the possibility of media amateurization becoming more of a professional to the point where it makes a lasting impact. And I think that's what Shirky is suggesting because fame still plays a part in determining the media landscape. Shirky says that famous people are still in different worlds from us (95). But still, he suggests that another shift of power to us amateurs can happen. I believe Twitter will play a big role in that. One example would be the "BlackLivesMatter" hashtag, which has gotten a lot attention in the media. The message behind it may not be the best way to try and reach everyone but it still made an impression on people. 

The phrase "Black Lives Matter" made an appearance on a pretty popular show Saturday Night Live, and definitely grabbed some attention. 

A lot of us amateurs still have a lot to learn in regards to handling social media. But we've come a long way since the MySpace and Xanga days. But our media literacy still has room for improvement. It's possible to create a closer social media community similar to Heather Lawver's fictional newspaper The Daily Prophet (Jenkins 178). I think difference is knowledge. Lawver's newspaper consisted of people who were very passionate about Harry Potter and knew most, if not everything, there was to the book series. So I think once more and more people become informed about the world around us as well how to exploit social media, changes and actual positive impact can occur. Like Shirky said, "Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution" (Shirky 107).

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Works Cited:
1. Shirky, Clay, "Everyone Is A Media Outlet," in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, (New York: Penguin, 2008) 55-80.
2. Shirky, "Publish, Then Filter," 81-108.
3. Jenkins, Henry, "Why Heather Can Write," in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 178.