Amateurs, Eh?

Since my thesis involves the rise of the amateur artist thanks to new media platforms, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the amateur writers littering social media sites like Tumblr. One in particular that holds my attention is Tyler Knott Gregson. He's an "amateur" poet known for his typewriter poems and daily haikus on the site. But is being an amateur really a bad thing? For him, all signs point to "no." Writing isn't Gregson's day job, (he makes his living as a wedding photographer) but his words still reach a wide audience, making an impact in their lives in the same way that poets in print impact others.


This brings to light our personal definition of the label of "amateur." Technically, an amateur is anyone that pursues an activity on an unpaid basis. So why do we view being an amateur, and being an amateur who utilizes new media to get their work seen, as somehow less than the "professional" writer who gets a paycheck? For one, we see the professional automatically as a better writer than the amateur. But that isn't a particularly effective way of viewing the situation. Someone with that perspective can end up consuming a lot of Stephenie Meyer quality work, which we all know is not superior simply because a publishing company decided to print and bind it.
We also know that most writers don't choose the career for the paycheck, as for most it isn't very considerable in size. Why do most writers write? Because they can't bear to do anything else, because it helps them maintain their sanity, etc. So why do we as consumers of the work care if someone got paid for the writing or if they put it out to the world for free? We assume that something we have to pay for will be of a higher quality than something we can obtain for free.

Luckily the abundance of new media society interacts with on a daily basis allows us to break through that assumption as we discover that the free content made available on the internet is just as varied and worthy as  the volumes of work we would come across in a bookstore. Just as you can find Shakespeare and Stephenie Meyer in the same Barnes and Noble, you can find quality work and... less than quality work on the same internet.