pro ams

The emergence of new media has blurred the lines between professionals and amateurs. These people have been named, pro ams. They are moving away from the professionals or experts and coming together and editing, changing and ever adding to a collective intelligence.

Axel Bruns (2008) comments on the ever increasing divide between the experts and these new called, pro ams, ‘between two different systems of representing knowledge: one the expert paradigm, which ultimately and ideally aims to develop well-behaved, universally accepted, and internally consistent understandings of the world, and one, the folksonomic paradigm, which allows for multiplicity, conflicts of interpretation, and the existence of a number of alternative representations of extant knowledge…’

As people are adjusting to the new media technologies, pro ams are taking over, just like Charles Leadbeater stated, ‘from astronomy to computing, networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations’. 

It seems that the ‘professional amatuers’ have been pushing and developing their networks and communities, forever editing and harnessing their collective intelligence to help redefine and shape society over the next years. Again, Leadbeater comments on this shift, ‘passionate amateurs, empowered by technology and linked to one another, are reshaping business, politics, science, and culture’.. 

Pin pointing the idea of pro ams comes the quote, ‘ knowledge is wide spread, not controlled in  a few ivory towers’. It is evident that the vessel that will shift us forward into the next century is this combination of the professional with the amatuers.

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