Mass amateurization refers to the capabilities that new forms of media have given to non-professionals (amateurs) and the ways in which those non-professionals have applied those capabilities to solve problems (e.g. create and distribute content) that compete with the solutions offered by larger, professional institutions. Mass amateurization is most often associated with Web 2.0 technologies. These technologies include the rise of blogs and citizen journalism, photo and video-sharing services such as Flickr and YouTube, user-generated wikis like Wikipedia, and distributed accommodation services such as Airbnb. While the social web is not the only technology responsible for the rise of mass amateurization, Clay Shirky claims Web 2.0 has allowed amateurs to undertake increasingly complex tasks resulting in accomplishments that would seem daunting within the traditional institutional model. In addition to whole websites and applications, Web 2.0 has also birthed a variety of digital tools that facilitate organization and problem solving on a large scale. These tools include tags, trackbacks, and hashtags. These new forms of media became widely available during the first decade of the 21st century due in part to the fall of transactional costs of creating and distributing media. Mass amateurization is a social, cumulative and collaborative activity, wherein ideas will flow back up the pipeline from consumers and they will share them among themselves. There is no institutional hierarchy in mass amateurization. There is only an informal group of collaborators working to solve a problem. Due to mass amateurization, amateurs are able to collaborate without the interference from the inherent obstacles associated with institutions. These obstacles include the costs that an institution incurs while educating, training, directing, coaching, advising, and organizing its members.
Background
Mass amateurization was first popularized by Clay Shirky in his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. Shirky notes that blogging, video-sharing and photo-sharing websites allow anyone to publish an article or photo without the need of being vetted by professionals such as news or photo editors. Mass amateurization is changing the definition of words like journalist and photographer to include non-professionals outside of the institutional realm. Furthermore, mass amateurization is changing the way news and other content is diffused and consumed by the public through various media outlets. George Lazaroui explains that mass amateurization "is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities," due to "an explosion of Internet tools designed to make media authoring easier" during the early 21st Century.
"Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals." -Clay Shirky
Circumventing institutional training Mass amateurization can also be described as a technological and cultural phenomenon whereby ordinary people access information-disseminating technologies that were historically only available to professionals. Specifically, Shirky cites collaborative projects such as Wikipedia and Linux. Here, the term "amateur", is not defined by the absence of money or skill, since the modern amateur can acquire consumer, prosumer, and professional-level technologies with increasing ease. Instead, an amateur can be described as a producer without traditional credentials or institutional training.
Emerging grassroots creativity Media scholar Henry Jenkins writes in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, that "the story of American Arts in the twenty-first century might be told in terms of the public reemergence of grassroots creativity as everyday people take advantage of new technologies that enable them to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content." This grassroots creativity is a form of mass amateurization because everyday people are creating interesting content that might not have been created by film or television institutions. In Jenkin's book one of the examples of is fan films, which are made possible thanks to the low transactional costs associated with making modern films. On the whole, individual amateurs suffer fewer costs when solving problems than institutions. Institutions have to buy land, construct buildings, recruit members or employees, and procure technologies so that their members can solve problems. Conversely, amateurs do not require those steps because they presumably already have their own house and computer at their disposal. They simply do not have to put as much effort into solving a problem as an institution would and that allows them to be competitive.
Developing skills as a leisure In his 1992 book Amateurs, Professionals, and Serious Leisure, Robert A. Stebbins refers to the phenomenon of mass amateurization as "serious leisure."
Stebbins views mass amateurization as a way to replace typical mundane employment as well as allow a person to increase their personal skills and value. He defines serious leisure as "the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that is sufficiently substantial and interesting for the participant to find a career there in the acquisition and expression of its specials skills and knowledge." This amateurization often occurs within "free time, spare time, uncommitted time, (and) discretionary time." Stebbins notes that compared to their 'publics,' both amateurs and professionals are the more capable groups. Furthermore, "the good amateurs are better than the mediocre professionals." This is how amateurs are able to threaten professional institutions. Institutions only have the resources to gather a certain number of professionals. Alternatively, the amateurs of the world do not need to put forth any resources to gather themselves. That is, they already exist within the world, all that is left to do is work. And since the world is so large, amateurs outnumber professionals in many fields. For instance, even if there are only 1,000,000 amateurs in a field, that law of averages indicates that enough of them will be those "good amateurs" and therefore be able to compete with the limited number of "mediocre professionals" that make up most of the institutional space.
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