The culture of the amateur
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- Category: College
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New technologies have made it possible for fans to interact even more with their favorite television shows and movies by compiling collections of their own and editing them to their own taste preferences. One of the most popular outlets of amateur culture is vidding , or fan-made music videos. These are some of the simplest skills to teach oneself, and arguably the most fun and entertaining. Vidding allows the author to combine TV and movie video clips with pieces of music and convey a certain idea about the original piece. Star Trek Meets Monty Python serves as an example of this; playing off of the seriousness of the Star Trek series and its similarities with the humorous narrative of Monty Python. This was the perfect example of full participation of a media audience by returning control to the everyday people rather than the mass media who produced the original film.


YouTube if you want to ...




The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen
Keen's book, published in , is a ranting polemic against Web 2. Poor Keen. Smart, but a long way from being wise, or even sensible. He cherry picks examples while praising the skills of balanced neutral research and reporting which can only, one surmises, be He is the host of the acclaimed Internet show AfterTV and frequently appears on radio and television. He lives in Berkeley, California.



The Cult of the Amateur
Our most. Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented. The very anonymity that the Web 2.





Bloggers are notoriously touchy so it's unlikely they'll respond with restraint to the comparison that opens Andrew Keen's polemic. Adapting the 'infinite monkey theorem', Keen, a British media commentator based in California, updates the typewriting primates to internet users. These 'monkeys' are not producing Shakespeare, they're deluging us with 'everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels'.


Where did you go in the first ten minutes?