Informant38

plasticbag.org �(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything...:
"Hard-rocking poorly-animated kittens that once roamed e-mail newsletters (http://www.b3ta.com) are now showing up in adverts and credit-sequences, pop-songs written on home computers are reaching the top of the charts, weblog commentators in Iraq are getting columns in the national and international newspapers, music is being hybridised and spliced in the home for competitions on national radio stations. The whole of the mainstream media has started to look towards an undercurrent of individual amateur creation because of the creativity that's bubbling up from this previously unknown swathe of humanity. Mass-amateurisation is EVERYWHERE.
� So what is generating this explosion in unprofessional production? Fundmentally it's because the gap between what can be accomplished at home and what can be accomplished in a work environment has narrowed dramatically over the last ten to fifteen years.
The first shift towards the mass amateurisation of everything arrived with a rise in the power of computers and a drop in the price of sophisticated software. Desktop publishing was the first professional tool to meet the mainstream - but it was never going to have a massive effect because the price of producing and distributing a magazine were always going to remain relatively high. You still need paper. You still need someone to drive your creation to all the news retailers. But while desktop publishing was never going to create a massive network of underground magazine publishers, its bastardisations in products like Microsoft Publisher and Word did set a trend that has been ongoing ever since - a trend towards giving amateurs tools at inexpensive prices that have all the power that professionals have become used to.
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So what will we see in the years ahead? We can expect computer power and technology to develop at a similar - perhaps even increasing - rate."
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{This thing where small bits of amazing and perfectly apt information are volleyed through the net.
Meme soccer.
Fast, instant, like phone-camera stuff only higher complexity, more compressed than just visual and/or text info.
To blogs as blogs are to the atomized newspapers/conversations-about-newspapers event-metabolizing of yore.
Light arcs.}