Week7- Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

What is mass amateurization?

Mass amateurization means the process whereby the two parts between experts and amateurs (a person does a thing because of his/her pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons) is dissolving and creating a new category of professional amateurs. It means that shift away from professionalization. For example, people change to writing to the internet rather than writing to the print media as internet creates a space or platform that encourages people to write out loud.

Compare with traditional publishing and weblogs

	Traditional publishing	Weblogs
Intrinsic value	Publish anything in print, more work & high cost. Large market share taken by big companies.	Platform for unlimited reproduction and distribution of written word, low and fixed cost
Extrinsic value	Need to convince a professionally skeptical system to take risk on print publishing due to the reason high cost on large scale printing.	Effortless as people can write out loud without asking for help and permission.

In mass amateurization, everyone can become professionalization as there is not constraint for them. People can take photo and share their photo through internet (weblogs, Facebook) although there are not professional in the particular field. People can share their ideas or mind in the written form through weblogs to tell the worlds what are they thinking about without any restrict compare to the print publishing. In print publishing, the publisher will edit the things that you write and publish to the public but the writing is not valuable to the author as that is not the original work that he or she wants to share about.

However, there are still limitations for weblogs posting or publishing the original works as it will become worthiness because weblogs doesn’t pay for the work but print publishing does. Like Shirky said in the article:

‘Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free like weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost nothing.’

However, recently, weblogs start to pay some rewards to encourage peoples to write more. The most famous or higher rated post will be given some incentive to encourages the webloggers to post more as webblogers will always be the de facto farm team ( people who written in practice or actuality, but not officially established). Those incentives will get from the advertisements which advertise in the particular weblog, personal sponsors or getting donations from Amazaon and Paypal tip jars.  

As conclusion, each types of publishing have it good and bad, like weblogs will be less credible compare to print publishing as mostly weblogs were written by the amateur and the print publishing is written by the professional who are more reliable by the public as professional are the expert in their field. This will become the limitation of weblogs but the one things that amateur can win professional is the creativity as amateur can publish whatever they one without restriction and they can written loudly whatever they think or the ideas in their mind.