Where Have the Amateurs Gone?
Amateurs in any discipline are the best, if you can connect with them. Unlike dilettantes, career professionals are to knowledge what prostitutes are to love.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto Book 3)
For people with a professional outlook, it's hard to understand how something that isn't professionally produced could affect them.
Clay Shirky • Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
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Amateurs are more likely to see what is actually there because there’s no money, no power, no prestige (at least not immediately) attached to seeing anything else. Amateurs mainly just want to know.
Jack Hitt • Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character
In many societies, one’s professional fate is decided by the tribe, the family. However, one is increasingly thrown back into ‘How can I develop my own voice and niche from where I can operate’? Is there something like an individual signature? Perhaps not, but I do believe in skills, in small steps, working on various projects at the same time with... See more
Jess Henderson • Digital Lockdown with Geert Lovink —
Similarly, I wonder whether the creator economy, as it matures, will resemble less of its original promise (a way for people to do the things they love), in favor of a “creator industrial complex.” Part of the problem is that creativity comes in fits and starts, and can’t always be tamed into a predictable routine. If you’re obligated to create som... See more
Nadia Asparouhova • The creator economy
When a profession has been created as a result of some scarcity, as with librarians or TV programmers, the professionals are often the last ones to see it when that scarcity goes away. It's easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence.
Clay Shirky • Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
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As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible.
Clay Shirky • Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
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