Posted by: n6905633 on: May 18, 2009
Well this seems to be the crux of every arguments against produsage, amateurism. People don’t know anything apparently, even the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, seems to be having second thoughts. Bruns states that Sanger believes “Wikipedia needs to be more elitist…which would explicitly undermine the value of the project” (Bruns 2008, 205). At first glance the professional versus amateur debate reads a bit like a boxing match. In the blue corner is the professional with their all knowing, educated opinion and in the red corner we have the “pimply teenager in their bedroom” as Harrington (2009b) puts it in his week 8 lecture. However, I don’t think it’s so black and white. Who is an expert and who is an amateur? Bruns possess the question “is and undergraduate or a post graduate student in a specific discipline of knowledge to be considered a dilettante or an expert?” (2008, 202) So as an undergraduate student I am writing this blog using numerous credible sources and my own knowledge gained through my university education thus far. Does this then make me an expert or an amateur? Furthermore, in the instance of game design or citizen journalism, is someone who is familiar with and engages ardently with the product an expert or a novice?
Leadbeater and Oakley (2005, 306) declare “to be a creative producer it helps to be an avid consumer”, I definitely believe this statement has merit. Without those consumers engaging with a product and then choosing to improve it, would not only would the internet be a boring place, but creativity would be stifled and some great demonstrations of human innovation would never have come to fruition. In my blog on produsage I gave the example of counterstrike a MOD of Half Life, made by one of it players. Countersrike is a great example of the important contribution a “novice” can make.
Anyway, is being an amateur such a bad thing? The Oxford Dictonary Second Edition (1999, 20) defines amateur as “a person that does something as a pastime rather than a profession.” At no point does it mention anything about being uninformed or uneducated and yet ‘amateur’ contributors are portrayed in such a negative light. For example, a person with a passion for human rights has a blog where they report on the latest on human rights issues, they are a novice partaking in citizen journalism. Regardless of the fact that they may know someone in the UN or they studied humanities at university or they are living in the country where the violations are taking place, they are automatically considered less credible than a journalist.
As I have said many times before, information produced by an amateur should be approached with caution, but to put a blanket dislike over all amateurs isn’t wise, for the reasons I have mentioned in all my blogs, but mostly because the term ‘amateur’ encompasses too broad a demographic.
May 27, 2009 at 6:35 am
Thank you for bringing up a point that often gets forgotten. Amateur, I agree is not synonymous with unreliable, bad or otherwise negative. Amateur is often just the step before professional and forgetting this, yes, is cutting yourself off from a lot of creative talent.
Many ‘professionals’ disregard the amateur side of web 2.0 as explained by Tony Long in his Wired Article “Internet Smackdown: The Amateur vs. the Professional (2007)”. He states “… opportunity and desire alone do not professional historians or journalists or pundits make. There’s this process known as “learning your craft” and “paying your dues” that all professionals must endure. Sorry, but trolling the web and blogging from your darkened study doesn’t qualify as on-the-job training”.
It is these closed views that bring a bad name to amateurs and forgetting that extensive research into a topic can bring about expertise, as can being a direct user accredit merit and indeed the title of expert. Bruns in his ‘Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond’ explains. “Although it is perhaps necessary to develop and deploy the means to filter the effects of participation by less knowledgeable contributors in any one field and community of knowledge, then to do so cannot be attempted on the basis of existing forms of ‘expert’ accreditation…which…are now found to be entirely unsuited to controlling participation in collaborative content creation (Bruns, 2008, pp. 209).
From these differing perspectives, the concept of ‘expert’ is one that is ill defined and subject to perspective. However, I do agree that amateur should not be linked with negativity but rather possibility and potential.