Epistemographer

The two categories that I’m thinking a lot about are amateur identity and commons-based peer production. Both have enjoyed increasing cultural prominence over the past several years, and their emergence has been very much framed in revolutionary rhetoric.

I’ll begin with a simple declaration: I want to very much separate the categories of “amateur” and “commons-based peer production,” in large part because the two have been so often conflated in both popular and scholarly discourse. This conflation seems to particularly have its roots in examinations of open source communities, a natural consequence of the twin facts that such communities are most often composed of amateurs, and that the entire project of open source has become the canonical example of commons-based peer production. In the rush of exuberance around open source, however, I’d argue that we’ve lost a very key of precision about what exactly we mean when we talk about amateurs and peer production.

Amateurs

I came to this point mainly through my work on amateurs and technology. Building from a dissertation chapter on videophile hobbyist culture during the early history of the VCR, I’ve grown increasingly interested in the question of what makes an amateur distinct from other users, and the formation of communities among amateurs. Rather than rehash my general riff on amateurs here, I’ll just post a 2-page ‘Think Piece’ that I published in the Annals of Computer History earlier this year – though a bit heavy on the “call to arms”, it lays out the basic territory I’m trying to explore.

As much as anything, I’ve spent much of the past year and a half trying to figure out what exactly to call the people I’m studying (I spent a good bit of the recent conference season ranting about this to no end). The standard term in Technology Studies seems to be “tinkerers,” which has always struck me as a bit effete (as does “hobbyists); “hackers” comes closer but has all sorts of uncomfortable connotations to many. Ultimately, I find myself coming back to “amateurs” because the binary opposition of “amateur” and “professional” points to a motivation rooted in love of a thing, rather than external pressures (external or otherwise).

These categories have tended to be unproblematic – professionals have generally been defined as those individuals with formal credentials who create value through their efforts (and are thus rewarded by the market), leaving everyone else in the catch-all category of “amateur.” The tricky thing, though, is that the neat and tidy distinction between amateurs and professionals has been increasingly blurred in recent years. In short, people without formal credentials who are working outside of traditional structures have been creating a whole lot of value. The buzzwords “prosumer” and “Pro-Am” come out of attempts to reconcile these seeming-amateurs with the seemingly-professional products of their efforts.

One of the key things that makes amateurs interesting to me is that both they and professionals engage with technology in the “wiki” mode that I’ve spent some time outlining below, but while professionals are explicitly educated and socialized into opening the black box of technology, amateurs reach the same end but without any of the formal training or enculturation. This is one of the big questions with which I’ve been grappling – if not through any of the traditional routes, how do amateurs reach this point?

Collaborative Peer Production

This orientation toward considering amateurs leads me to consider commons-based peer production – well, it actually lead me directly to commons-based peer production. The general gist of the argument (and the part that I need to flesh out more) is as follows:

• Community formation is endemic to technological amateurs (this is the argument of the first chapter of my dissertation, which I won’t go into here)…

• Because amateurs are by definition motivated by love of the act rather than monetary rewards, there are no inherent bases for competition, and in fact virtually every amateur culture I’ve surveyed is founded on a free exchange of information and innovation. If anything, the major difference between contemporary amateur cultures and earlier ones is the greater ease of communication, with centralized websites and discussion boards taking the place of printed newsletters and phone trees (though in-person conventions remain more or less a constant).

• This orientation toward open exchange and forward movement results in the development of a sort of limited commons, available to any member of the (variably insular and meritocratic) community.

• The ensuing commons-based peer production of both knowledge and artifacts (particularly knowledge, bootstrapping off of my earlier posts about the “instruction manual” for technology) is essentially a consequence of the amateur identity.

• The wiki metaphor for technological knowledge pays off here, highlighting the collaborative and social aspects of knowledge production; members of a technological amateur community build a shared corpus of knowledge and artifacts off of each other’s work.

• Amateur identity and commons-based peer production are thus distinct things; the former generally leads to the latter, but the commons-based peer production is by no means solely the product of amateur cultures. The tension between amateur and professional open source communities, for example, would be a rich area in which to further explore commons-based peer production in differing motivational contexts.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2005 at 1:29 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.