Celebrating and Embracing Amateurism in an Online World
I believe it is safe to assume we all have a desire to be professional in something. Whether it is related to work or just for fun with our hobbies or passions, we are inundated with professional work everywhere in our lives, through visuals, words, sounds, and so on. They’re created with skill, made with years of practice behind the creators’ belts. Decades ago, professionalism meant exclusivity, a high barrier for entry that is mostly motivated by money and clout, and venues for sharing anything less than professional were relegated to small groups of people, seen as an unserious and amateur. Amateur in a negative way, of course. What use is amateur work, anyway?
Well, all of a sudden, social media appeared and gave us an opportunity to not only be widely more accepting of amateurism, but more embracing of it as well.
The idea of “content” has become much vaster to the point that anyone with access to social media can be a content creator in some capacity. It can be even our dumbest thoughts, but the fact that we get to type them into words or image or videos and share them to a global community is enough to make that intrinsic motivation soar. Thing is, there is no tangible gain from this; maybe followers, comments and likes may be tangible to some, but this speaks to a different kind of motivation than we are used to seeing in the professional world.
Amateurism speaks to intrinsic motivation within content creators because it rids of higher hurdles to cross, which “reduce[s] the number of people who do [the activity]” (Shirky, 83) By being able to share anything with less judgment than in the professional world, any creator of writing, art, music, video, any artistic or journalistic medium, has more of a leg to stand on because they are socially motivated with connectedness and membership (78) by being part of a larger community and sharing different kinds of information. Feedback loops, community, visibility, expression, and discovery all feed into a global scope of participation that increases because of social media, where people are able to see what we post in the blink of an eye.
More people are being amateurish — which sounds negative at first — in a positive way. They do it out of passion and love for what they do, to love doing what social media allows them to accomplish: sharing experimental music with Soundcloud, amateur photography on Instagram, and the dumbest quips on Twitter. The amount of activity increases because of the various forms of participation and sharing between and within larger online communities that act as a form of stimulus that, for amateurs, is irreplaceable.
Social media replaces all the high barriers between amateur and professional, where “motivations previously remanded to the private sphere [are] now bursting in public,” and those more personal spheres are being broken down so that “any of us can publicly seek and join with like-minded souls” (95). Not to mention, the continuous ripples of passion throughout social media of different forms of creation surely pave the way to more professional work and opportunities down the line. Everyone has to start somewhere, after all.
People continue to use — and will certainly not stop using — social media because it creates communities that encourage sharing even the most minuscule of content, for free, with little to no barriers of entry and with a variety of platforms with unique motivations: to share and communicate, to be seen, to be heard, with the use of our cognitive surplus. Of course, we can contest the amount of freedom and the harm in can do — anonymity and cyberbullying included — but ultimately for the millions of bridges it has built, it is well worth the sacrifice.
