Spare a Flickr of sympathy for professional photographers | Technology | The Observer

Can't decide if this is cogent or another waaawaaawaaa shit. Hmmm

Spare a Flickr of sympathy for professional photographers | Technology | The Observer:

"What's happening to professional photography is just one instance of 'the mass amateurisation of publishing', to use a phrase coined by the cultural critic Clay Shirky, who has no time for elegies for vanishing worlds. He sees our current angst as just the latest instalment of a reaction that's been going on since Gutenberg upended the apple-cart. 'Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient,' he says. 'Readily available translations of scripture did destroy the Church as a pan-European institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of publishers was flyweight. Scribes did lose their social function. And so on.'

Something similar is happening now, Shirky claims. The internet, like printing before it, is producing 'a staggering volume of new material, some good but most flyweight. It too is upending the role of traditional gatekeepers and destroying the older economics of scarcity. And it too is leading to a cottage industry of hand-wringing: 'Why can't we just get a little bit of internet, but keep most things the way they were?''

Why indeed? Trouble is: nostalgia, like photography, ain't what it used to be."