In the information network era, internet is what makes us to mass amateurization. Mass amateurization refers to the capabilities that new forms of media have given to non-professionals and the ways in which those non-professionals have applied those capabilities in order to create and distribute content and solve problems in ways that compete with larger, professional institutions. Mass amateurization is most often associated with Web 2. For now, the most concentration of mass amateurization is media, but the so-called “media” is dispeled. The appearance of electronic media brings about the resolution of traditional literary boundary, the creation of cyberspace and the rise of the age of mass carnival.“Amateurs” are showing their power.
In Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody-Everybody is a Media Outlet,” it points out that the groups formed with new abilities and their work doesn’t need to follow the management rules, and they overcome the limitation of the traditional shackles of validity. Whether google, Wikipedia or blog, a new group of “no organization force” formed a clear chain: from sharing, cooperation in collective action. This chain with a number of participants from the most to least, and the more back means that members should be consciously to pay more attention and more resources. But here the word “more”is relative. As an example, WeChat, blog, even earlier blog, forum, from users share information to collective action based on certain information, the cost of participation can be said “negligible.” This leads to a concept, Clay Shirky called it “mass amateurization.” It is not difficult to understand. A short span of two or three years, blog has redefined the “news” in China, but also changed the existing media news. News from a process of the media production, verifies information format one by one, change to the “everyone is a media outlet” under the mode of information. Also, in the last two years, the more and more obviously trend is that traditional media guides blog has become leading the traditional media news. In a sense, the “first filtering, and published” rules of news quietly make changes as “first published, than filtering”.
“The first publishing, then refiltering” does not only mean traditional media, and the publishing industry rules of game challenges. “Mass amateurization” gets operation effect based on traditional organization system in many industries and social problems field, such the “amateur” brought the negative problems are not seriously that people estimated. “Everybody is a Media Outlet” explains that the spontaneous division of labour is an open process, it avoids the institutional dilemma, but also broke the the operation of professional talents, and confirmed posts, but let the division of labor and division of wisdom become more leaner.
Just as the network, it is more closer to people’s life with “no organization of organizational strength” this organizational strength also began to promote the social and the change of the world. Clay Shirky’s opinion is that technology is changing the public reaction step by step by eliminating the limitations. In recent years, some areas frequently appear public events all over the world, such as the “occupy Wall Street,” and aimed at environmental pollution, this kind of protest and so on. Clay Shirky thinks, this is absolutely not only from freely carnival, but it indicates a change is rising in the future,based on love, justice, common likes and experiences. People can flexible and effective use WeChat, blog, mobile phone, network communication tools to share together, cooperation and expand collective action.
Mass amateurization bring us some revelatios, if we are able to reduce trading costs of an industry we will have the ability to define new rules of the game. From this point of view, Every industry is very complex, no long-term immersion, cannot form the general understanding about the trading cost, therefore the change would not be mentioned. Mass amateurization brought anxiety, such as the professional ethics dies,professional ethics comes from the same industry practitioners. It is not allowed to do when a programmer copy master code before leave; as a reporter, news report inconsistent with the facts, the invasion of privacy will denounce. After mass amateurization,everyone hides in behind the veil,stands on the high moral, no longer comply with any regulations, action with their emotion completely, it is very dangerous, because most people enjoy violence as spectators at the same time and also they must think of themselves could be the next.
Media 180 Winter Session 2015 