Cultural Value in the Age of "Mass Amateurisation"

[Archived in Edit Digital Video, Entry]

Jean on 2003/09/09:

  „The democratization of technologies means that non-specialist practitioners (I won't use "amateurs" because it does sound pejorative, but unlike some others , I am not accusing Tom of "kicking us in the guts" for using it) can create, edit and distribute digital images, music, text, and video cheaply and without enormous technical expertise (but, as Coates points out, this expertise can be gained more easily today than in the past through the use of online information networks). As we can guess from the behaviour of the wilfully obtuse and cranky print journalists' move to stereotype blogging as a poor imitation of "real" journalism (see Kuboid for examples), the "mass amateurisation of everything" appears to threaten the monopoly on production previously enjoyed by specialists. I don't see this so much as a literally economic threat however, but rather as a threat to social and cultural capital: a threat to the scarcity of expertise and authority.“

http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess/archives/ 000360.html - Cached

See Technorati for links to this blog,

Some slightly related:

Creativity Machine

  „Tom Coates' insightful and focused article "Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of (Nearly) Everything ", and the followup by Tom of bbCity, have come at just the right time for me. For the last few weeks I have posted several short pieces on the social impacts of cultural profileration and the democratization of creative technologies, mostly concerned with music , but also touching on visual arts . What follows is a work in progress, an attempt to find a centre for some apparently disparate, but deeply related ideas about new and old technologies, the collapsing professional and amateur divide, and notions of cultural value or "quality."“

http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/.../ 2003_09_07_creativitymachine_archive.html - Cached

Roger L. Simon: It Wasn't Just the Politicians....

  „Jay Rosen has a piece this morning -- This Summer Will Tell Us If We're Serious: Tom Bettag Brings Realism Before the Tribe of Murrow -- about a speech made by Bettag (Nightline's producer) at a televison journalist's award's ceremony. Bettag called his colleagues to task for not being sufficiently alert to Al Qaeda in advance of 9/11, just as politicians of both sides have been excoriated for the same ostrich-like behavior in the recent hearings. This is a direct quote from Bettag's speech:“

http://rogerlsimon.com/archives/00000942.htm - Cached

Posted at October 09, 2003 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)