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Saturday, November 12
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MIP09
Amateur Creativity andMedia Ecologies
D. Ashton
2
1
University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, Winchester, United Kingdom
This panel has been convened in order to develop a presence for research and theorization concerning the amateur in the ECREA Media Industries and Cul‑
tural Production Section. It aims to explore questions that are under-developed in media and cultural studies and which may present ontological challenges
for existing paradigms of industry and production and for ways of thinking hopefully beyond the exigencies of austerity and the profit-motive. Questions
informing papers in this panel concern the historical and contemporary role of the amateur across media, creative and cultural ecologies, between produc‑
tion, circulation and consumption. What roles do policy, education, expertise, professionalism, skills and reputation play in demarcating the boundaries,
status and economic rewards of cultural work and the aspirations of workers as professionals or amateurs? How do such issues inform the nature of media
businesses, networks and individual enterprise? How are the relationships between professionals and amateurs inflected by power – in terms of questions
of intellectual property or co-creative relations? How have digital media impacted upon economies, media practices and the demarcation of fields, of pro‑
fessional and amateur, of reward and recognition in cultural production? Ultimately, how might one conceive of amateurism in the context of questions
set out above? Methodologically, how are we to access and conceptualize amateurism in practice and an idea in and beyond familiar boundaries of media
and cultural production research? How does it impact on conceptualizing the nature of work, leisure, pleasure and indeed human flourishing, creativity and
culture itself?
PN 261
For the Love of the Thing: Conceptualizing the Role of the Amateur in the Contemporary Cultural Ecology
P. Long
1
, D. Ashton
2
1
Birmingham City University, School of Media, Birmingham, United Kingdom
2
University of Southampton, Winchester, United Kingdom
In her essay ‘Amateur Versus Professional’ (1965), filmmaker Maya Deren notes that amateur ‘means one who does something for the love of the thing
rather than for economic reasons or necessity’. In spite of this, the word has an apologetic and often pejorative ring to it. As Broderick Fox (2004) suggests
of the negative connotations of the term, it is ‘not sophisticated, not technically adept, not pretty or polished, not of popular interest, or perhaps most
frequently and opaquely, not professional.’This paper asks: what is the meaning and status of the amateur in the wider economy of media and cultural
production? How does an apprehension of the amateur impact upon our paradigms of media and cultural production?While there is a rich diversity of am‑
ateur cultural production, and in spite of the sociology of Robert Stebbins (1979; 1992), the figure of the amateur has only lately begun to receive sustained
attention in media and cultural research. Here we might cite ideas of the‘Pro-Am’(Leadbeater & Miller, 2004), Ramon Lobato’s identification of the shadow
and informal media economies (2012; 2015) and his work with Dan Hunter, Megan Richardson and Julian Thomas on ‘Amateur Media’(2012). Specifically,
the figure of the amateur has likewise featured in studies of everyday music making (Finnegan, 1989), everyday video cultures (Buckingham and Willett,
2009), and YouTube and vernacular creativity (Burgess and Green, 2014). Most recently, John Holden (2015) has located an idea of ‘homemade’production
in a continuumwith publicly funded and commercial activity in the cultural ecology. This paper outlines how the role of the amateur raises questions about
the nature of creativity, status and economics and indeed the definition of ‘industry’ across fields such as the arts, film, music, gaming, broadcasting and
informational areas such as journalism, documentary and current affairs. Conceptualizing the amateur may have something to say too about gender, class
and social identities in cultural work. Furthermore, the nature of the amateur troubles the boundaries between professional and amateur media production
in a wider cultural ecology in relation to the motives and rewards for expression, circulation and consumption. While offering a theorization of the amateur
in such contexts, we seek to offer also an outline of possible programmes for empirical studies that address the gaps in the fieldWe seek to place our ques‑
tions and frame the papers in this panel in the context of the role of contemporary media and cultural communication and a suggestion prompting this
conference’s themes that modernity ‘is haunted by the disparity of its various histories, geographies, ontologies and technologies’.
PN 262
Cultural Labour, Social Media and Expertise: The Experiences of Female Artists
K. Patel
1
1
Birmingham City University, School of Media, Birmingham, United Kingdom
For the female cultural worker, working from home is not new. Domestic labour has been carried out by women for centuries and has traditionally been
dismissed as ‘women’s work’ (McRobbie, 2016). However, the internet, increasingly flexible working patterns and ‘equal opportunities’ feminism have all
contributed to opportunities for women to work for themselves from home, as part of flexible working arrangements in full-time employment (Gregg,
2008), as cultural producers and artists (Taylor, 2015) or a combination of both (Hughes, 2012). Social media and art and craft seller websites such as Etsy
allow anyone to create and sell cultural products and potentially to make money from it. This has raised questions about the status and legitimacy of am‑
ateur artistic production and its impact on ‘professional’ artists (Luckman, 2015). Social media also allows individuals, whatever their status, to announce
that they are expert in their field, potentially reaching a global audience, yet the implications of this are yet to be explored in analyses of cultural work.
Those who talk about ‘experts’ in the cultural industries usually refer to cultural intermediaries, consultants and art critics (Prince, 2010; Taylor, 2013), and
the idea of the expert is traditionally masculinized (Thomas-Hunt and Phillips, 2004). What about the artists themselves and the nature of their expertise?
What about the female experts in cultural production? This paper explores these questions by examining how a group of UK female artists, working from
home, use social media to perform expertise. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of their social media posts, this paper argues that the concept of expertise
can be a useful analytical tool for understanding cultural production in the social media age, including the ways female cultural workers mobilize online to
not only benefit their own careers, but each other.