In a society where produsage is becoming more and more popular it is hard to determine just where the professional and amateur community stands. What is the relationship between that of the professionals and the amateurs? Can they co-exist or must it be the survival of the fittest, most useful, most popular?
The professional and amateur community have always been portrayed as being at each other’s throats. The professionals would criticise the amateurs for their lack of focus and lack credentials to back up their views and opinions. The amateurs would then criticise the professionals for their dullness and technical jargon that’s difficult for anyone but other professionals to understand. The professional community has always been seen as standing on the losing end of the scale due to the scarcity and expenses related to building a professionals-only community (Leadbeater and Miller 2004) and its inability to provide for the convenience and practicality highly favoured in the current society. As Henry Jenkins (in Sternberg 2007) explains, ‘a teenager doing homework may juggle four or five windows, scanning the web, listening to and downloading MP3 files, chatting with friends, word-processing a paper and responding to email, shifting rapidly between tasks’. In a fast paced, multi-tasking society it is vital that information can be found quickly and can easily be understood. A recent survey by Professor Alan Knight shows that many journalism students are now turning to new media instead of traditional news services as they considered traditional news services too impractical as it had to be purchased, has a tendency to fall apart, the articles are too long winded and there are no search engines (ABC news 2009). This is when amateur saturated content such as Wikipedia becomes handy. However as explained in the last blog, Wikipedia too has its imperfections.
With both the professional and amateur communities displaying their individual flaws there is now the creation of a third community, the Pro/Am hybrid community. The Pro/Am hybrid community is one which adopts elements of both the professional and amateur communities (Flew 2008, 149). An example of such a community is OhMyNews where professional news staff is mixed with citizen journalists, with the professionals acting as the mentors for the amateurs helping them develop and refine their skills as journalists (Yeon-Ho in Flew 2008, 149). This new hybrid community is powerful in that in incorporates both the benefits of the professional and amateur communities while reducing the flaws that were once present in these communities. With the hybrid communities, they now have the credibility of the professional communities while also integrating the flexibility and convenience of the amateur community hence bringing together the best of two worlds. However that does not mean that the other two communities are to be ruled off completely, there is always a time and place when these communities are preferred above the others. For example, Amateur communities are best when looking for opinions and topics which professionals are not interested in, while professional communities are beneficial in instances where one needs to gain an insightful and detailed understanding of a certain topic.
Some interesting examples of Amateur culture:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/
(A dictionary-like site filled with everyday slangs. Useful for those words or acronyms that we come across but have no idea about. Is it rude? A compliment? What sort of response should you have? Absolutely vital in a society where ‘lol’ing and ‘rofl’ing are becoming common everyday language.)
(A large collection of trivial articles on almost every topic you can possibly think of!)
http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
(A site similiar to Wikipedia but differs in that it is dedicated to only topics related to ABC’s Lost Series.)
An interesting example of Professional culture:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium
(A site similiar to Wikipedia but with stricter rules.)
An interesting example of Pro/Am hybrid culture:
(A site that is dedicated to movies. Employs people to enter information onto the site while also allows users to comment alongside the articles.)
References:
ABC News. 2009. Journalism students ‘don’t read papers’. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/11/2513424.htm (accessed May 9, 2009).
Flew, T. 2008. New Media: an introduction. 3rd ed. South Melbourne: Oxford University press.
Leadbeater, C. and P. Miller. 2004. The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society. http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:okRjLTyb0ZcJ:openlearn.open.ac.uk/file.php/3843/promo_1.pdf+when+pro+-+Ams+are+networked+together,+they+can+have+a+huge+impact&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au (accessed May 20, 2009).
Sternberg, J. 2007. KCB104 Media and communications Industries: Lecture notes. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology.
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