This is a little late, yesterday was my birthday!! (woo hoo I’m 21 haha)
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As I read this week’s reading in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, I found the text to be a lot more comprehendable than Wikinomics in the way that Here Comes Everybody focuses on the action and reaction, and on the positive and negative possibilities of each example given. It’s a lot easier to understand and agree, since he provides both sides of the argument and looks at the overall picture.
What are the implications of the new “ease of assembly” (48) for politics, the arts, culture or design?
What I want to write about isn’t exactly about the “ease of assembly”,but rather the results of having an ease of assembly and how it relates to the professionalism as discussed in the latter part of this week’s reading.
One question I have regarding the journalism – blogging discussed on pages 70-72 though, does journalistic priviledges apply when blog posts are open to read on the web? From how I understand traditional journalism, they do private interviews to get privileged information. But if this information was free to access on a blog, how would that be considered priviledged?
The example of professional photography leads me to think about how these days, anyone with a quality camera like a canon slr can take “professional” looking photos. This begs the question then, what exactly is professional? Is it the quality, their popularity, how they present themselves, their prices (if it involves pricing), or something else? As mentioned on page 75 though, “the only real arbiter of professionalism in photography today is the taxman; in the United States, the IRS defines a professional photographer as someone who makes more than $5,000 a year selling his or her photos.” But someone just as good as a “professional” may not be doing it for a living, would it be wrong to not call them professional as well?
I’m also thinking of Etsy as an example; there are tons of artists there from fashion designers to illustrators. The fashion designers, the idea of needing a physical store is already outdated. Isn’t it possible that the whole foundation of fashion magazines, fashion shows, the “professionalism” become outdated as well, like photography and journalism? The problem though I know of with Etsy and this definition of professionalism is that many times sellers who are new (but have a great product) on Etsy have no idea that they need to collect taxes and file for business licenses. Some people just assume they can put their items up and sell like eBay. So the customers assume that these sellers are professional, but really they’re very new to being a professional of the traditional sense.
Does this bring down the value to “professionalism”, I’m starting to think it might. But completely overtaking the value, maybe not. I think quality will always be synomous to professional, however quality may become less important if speed becomes more important.
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