The Blurring Line Between Amateur and Professional - Business - The Atlantic

Read the whole thing, and make notes. The future is not written, but the pencils are sharp and they are ready to go...

The Blurring Line Between Amateur and Professional - Business - The Atlantic:

"In his new book, Cognitive Surplus, Shirky argues that what looked like a fact about human nature turns out to be merely an artifact of limited 20th century media technologies. Because only a small group of professional writers had access to the technologies of mass publication, it seemed obvious that writing for publication was a job for professionals. And because the rest of us had never participated in the process, it was widely assumed we didn't want to.

We now know that assumption was wrong. Many ordinary people jump at the chance to be producers as well as consumers. They blog. They tweet. They upload YouTube videos and Flickr photos. They create Wikipedia. They leave comments telling bloggers like me that we're idiots. Moreover, it turns out that we sometimes prefer amateur content such as Charlie bit my finger or ICanHasCheezburger: what they lack in polish they make up in charm."

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