Amateurs and professionals

The distinction between professionals and amateurs is one that's so familiar today as to seem perfectly natural. Professionals are serious, amateurs are dilettantes; professionals know what they're doing, and have credentials and training, amateurs don't; professionals get paid, amateurs are hobbyists. Of course, in a few fields there are exceptions to the rule: astronomy, for example, continues to have a place for amateur comet-watchers.

In the past few years, we've seen a number of claims that new technologies or technology-enabled phenomena are leveling the playing field between professionals and amateurs. The interpretation of blogging, and in particular of political blogging, as a bottom-up response to professional journalism is but the latest incarnation of this trend-- though it's interesting to note that this is an occasion in which the term "professional" is used as an epithet: it's right up there with "elitist." (I've also written about blogging and the Victorian concept of the amateur here.)

According to a newly-released report by UK research group Demos, there are a number of fields in which you can see the balance between amateurs and professionals shifting:

The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society

From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy.

For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it.

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse range of Pro-Ams and containing new data about the extent of Pro-Am activity in the UK, this report proposes new policies to support and encourage valuable Pro-Am activity.

Perhaps it's no surprise that a British think-tank would see this trend: after all, the sophisticated amateur-- or "gentlemanly specialist" as historian of science Martin Rudwick described them-- was a staple of science, letters, and other enterprises into the last century.

Comments

[Richard L. James]

BBC News magazine have just written about Demos' Pro-Ams report in an article titled - BBC: Rise of the anoraks.