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.

h3. 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?

h3. 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.

Earlier this year, O’Reilly Publishing introduced a new quarterly publication called Make. Addressing his readers, editor and publisher Dale Dougherty wrote, “More than mere consumers of technology, we are makers, adapting technology to our needs and integrating it into our lives. Some of us are born makers and others, like me, become makers almost without realizing it…Becoming a maker is a lot like becoming a better cook-you can follow or improvise upon the work of experts.”

In some ways, the debut of Make points toward what seems a broader trend in the world of contemporary technology, the growing resurgence of individuals who don’t fit into traditional categories of “producer” or “user.” A recent Demos report pointed in a similar direction, coining the term “Pro-Am” to refer to “innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards” who, the authors argue, “could have a huge influence on the shape of society in the next two decades”.¹

Amateurs and Technology

As historians of technology, we might be forgiven for not quite buying into the hype; while a distinct feature of the contemporary landscape, Dougherty’s “makers” occupy the same social space as earlier individuals labeled as hackers, tinkerers, amateurs, hobbyists or enthusiasts. In the early days of wireless telegraphy, skilled amateurs with crystal radio sets (traditionally cast as “boy operators”) ranged through the ether, and once the medium had shifted to voice and music broadcasts, hobbyists known as “dx-ers” (and later, “hams”) tinkered with their radio sets to receive signals from around the country and around the world.² Audiophiles have pushed the boundaries of both their hi-fi stereos and their own ears in their quest for the purest sound.³ Outside the realm of information technology, early rural automobile owners reconfigured their Model Ts to serve as everything from plows to washing machines, foreshadowing hot rod culture by decades (albeit in a more obviously productive way than today’s “pimped rides” tricked out with chrome wheels, LCD screens and neon lighting).⁴ And, of course, amateurs and tinkerers are particularly relevant to readers of this journal, as the early days of personal computing were dominated by enthusiastic hobbyists concentrated in groups like the famed Homebrew Computer Club, and vibrant communities persist to this day around “case-modding” and other maker activities.⁵

So, what drives these amateurs? In her dissertation on ham radio hobbyists, Kristen Haring uses the concept of “technical identity” to describe their uniquely intimate relationship with their rigs. This relationship manifests in tinkering, which Haring describes as a “productive [form] of leisure” with an active technical component. As an analytic category, however, tinkering reaches far beyond her radio hams.⁶ If technological literacy can be defined as the knowledge of how to use a given technology, then it might be said that tinkerers possess a certain technological fluency, the ability not only to read meanings of the technology (i.e. follow an instruction manual), but also to speak new ones. Such makers - in this case, Dougherty’s phrase seems particularly apt - don’t simply draw on black-boxed knowledge; they unpack and rewrite it to suit their whims.

Experts, lay users, and the gray area between

More than mere curiosities, these individuals throw into sharp relief our understanding of the relationship between technology and people. By this point, it’s uncontroversial to argue that the invention of a technology requires the simultaneous manufacture of a physical artifact and knowledge about its meaning and use, but this “social construction of technology” perspective raises a thorny issue: in theory, every user of a technology is able to reinvent it at her pleasure, yet few do. Why are most technologies relatively stable?

One answer to this question is that theory doesn’t map entirely onto reality; it takes material and social resources to alter what Thomas Hughes called the “momentum” of a given technology, and both come in limited supply. The means of production for physical things and knowledge about those artifacts are (to varying degrees) held in the hands of a relatively small minority, and the presence of Dougherty’s makers highlights the issues of identity and expertise that are bound up with this process.

Amateurs by definition occupy a gray area, complicating our understanding of “producer” and “user” or “work” and “leisure” as distinct categories. On the one hand, they act like experts, building up and sharing both codified and tacit knowledge and quite literally making (and remaking) technology; at the same time (as Dougherty wrote in Make) they explicitly self-identify as non-professional, marking off their identity in terms of “tinkering” with or “hacking” already-created technologies rather than crafting them from whole cloth.

We might better understand the position of amateurs by importing some theory from a neighboring discipline; for the past two decades, scholars of the unfortunately-acronymed “public understanding of science” (PUS) have worked to understand the relationship between scientific experts (who are able to create new scientific knowledge) and non-expert laypeople (who aren’t). Their conclusion? It’s not necessarily that a layperson is constitutionally unable to engage in scientific knowledge production, but rather that he or she wouldn’t be taken seriously as part of the discussion; the ability to legitimately produce knowledge is determined by factors more social than innate.

In the case of science, the expert community is the only game in town; hobbyists haven’t played a prominent role in scientific knowledge production since the professionalization of science during the 19th century. Though also bound up with questions of knowledge-production, the case of technology is slightly different. Science is seen as a forward march toward a single natural truth, while differences of opinion about technology use are generally more tolerable; hence the pressures on dissenting voices in science are much greater than the same social pressures on tinkerers who might crack open a majority-held, black-boxed technological frame. In short, there’s space to tinker because the ontological stakes are lower.

Enthusiast Norms and Communities

Tinkering has most often been described as a solitary activity, and studies of tinkerers like Haring’s hams or Douglas’ dx-ers often center on the relationship between an individual’s tinkering and his self-identity, particularly as it relates to the renegotiation of masculinity in the 20th century. While valuable, this perspective runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees, overlooking the important role played by communities in sharing information and defining the normative boundaries of tinkering.

One canonical example of such a hobbyist community can be found in the early days of computing. In their actively social engagement with technology, many computer enthusiasts adhered to what Steven Levy calls the “Hacker Ethic.” The culture of early computer enthusiasts and hobbyists, Levy writes, was based around “a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost - to improve the machines, and to improve the world.” For Levy, this ethic was neatly encapsulated in the verb “to hack,” the act of finding an elegant solution to a problem using the technological tools at hand. Sherry Turkle comes to a similar conclusion, explaining that “a central organizing theme in hacker culture…is ‘The Hack.’ It is the holy grail.” For both Levy and Turkle, “hacking” goes beyond mere tinkering in its aesthetic appreciation of the elegance and beauty of a particular bit of tinkering, as well as its normative assertion that to hack is fundamentally good, and that it is even better to share your hacks with others.⁷

One of the central ironies in the recent history of computing is that such hacking, initially seen with “grudging admiration” through the 1960’s and 1970’s as a valuable (if eccentric) source of creativity and innovation, has become synonymous with criminal activity. What happened? Philosopher Helen Nissenbaum has explored this transition, offering the insight that the change doesn’t lay with the hackers themselves, but rather their cultural context. The “Hacker Ethic” of openness and sharing clashed with a growing corporate reliance on information technology and the attendant politics of information as property, and in the harsh light of the latter computer hackers were reframed from heroes to hooligans.⁸

Looking ahead

The subject of amateurs and technology is becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary culture, as the boundaries between producer and consumer continue to blur. “User-centered design” is a hot new trend. Sociologists and businesspeople alike are trying to figure out how to understand open source software communities, whose participants complicate even the most sophisticated understanding of what constitutes an amateur. A panel at last year’s SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems conference addressed the topic from an explicitly pragmatic angle, offering a discussion of “Design for Hackability.” And when O’Reilly - the go-to publisher of programming reference books - starts publishing a quarterly magazine aimed directly at hackers and tinkerers, you know that something’s up.

So why now? Why are “makers” or “Pro-Ams” gaining prominence in this particular moment? While the question needs much more exploration, a tentative answer might be found in the centrality of information and computing technology to our lives - while a hot rod enthusiast needs an auto shop full of tools in order to “hack” his car, the only material tool needed by an open-source coder is a common desktop computer. It seems that with the rise of software-driven information technology comes a lowering of the material constraints on tinkering, at the same time that new media like the Web have facilitated communication and community-formation among hobbyists. For historians of technology, the growing visibility of contemporary amateurs means that the very issues of authority, identity and expertise that lie at the center of our work are thrust to the forefront of popular discourse; we could do far worse than to seize the opportunity and join the discussion.

¹ C. Leadbeater and P. Miller, “The Pro-Am Revolution. How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society,” Demos, 2004.

² S. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, Ch. 6; Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ‘N’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern, Times Books, 1999, Ch. 3.

³ Joseph O’Connell, “The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear: High End Audio and the Evolutionary Model of Technology,” Technology and Culture 33, no. 1 (1992).

⁴ R. Kline and T. Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture vol. 37, 1996.

⁵ B. Simon, “Geek Chic: Machine Aesthetics, The Materiality of Information and the Hardcore Gamer,” Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, 2004.

⁶ Kristen Haring, “Technical Identity in the Age of Electronics,” Dissertation, Harvard University, 2002.

⁷ S. Levy, Hackers, Dell Publishing, 1984; S. Turkle, The Second Self : Computers and the Human Spirit, Simon and Schuster, 1984.

⁸ H. Nissenbaum, “Hackers and the Contested Ontology of Cyberspace,” New Media & Society vol. 6, no. 2, 2004.

At the moment, one of the most intriguing aspects of his past few posts has been watching him try to find the language to explain what he’s doing:

“I’m attempting to revisit the idea of arts patronage in the context of the internet. Patrons of the arts have typically been wealthy individuals, well-heeled foundations, or corporations. As we’ve seen in many contexts, the net allows individuals from geographically dispersed locations to aggregate themselves for any number of reasons. So, when you’ve got a group of people who are interested in a particular artist, writer, etc., they should be able to mobilize over the internet and support that person directly instead of waiting around for the MacArthur Foundation or Cosimo de Medici to do it.”

And today:

“There’s a transaction here; you’re paying me in return for a (hopefully) interesting, engaging, timely site that’s full of information and creative projects and updated on a daily basis. So while I think the micropatronage idea fits the best with what I’m doing, there are also elements of the subscription idea in there as well. It’s hard to tell you exactly what I mean (either English is failing me here or I’m failing English), but I hope you get the gist of it.”

Not to harp on an old point, but this is exactly the idea I was working over a few months back, when I talked about “tipping” vs. “buying” as a means of support for culture production (links here, here and here):

“Now, I’m not somebody who buys into the technologically rah-rah, “everything’s different now that we have the internet!” sort of rhetoric, but it does seem to me that something worth noting has been happening – in short, a resurrection of the old patronage model, but on a grand and distributed scale. This isn’t anything new, of course – when I buy a CD from a musician whom I’ve just heard play at a local bar, I feel like I’m not just buying a commodified good, but rather that I’m helping to support his or her ability to make music. Now, it seems like some people are starting to use the internet to expand the reach of the metaphorical hat they leave out on the street, even as you get the sense that they’d be doing what they’re doing regardless of whether or what you toss in it, just like that musician at the local bar.”

“In a way, the crucial difference here is between buying and tipping. In the first case, you’re paying for a good or service, and feel no attachment toward the person producing it. In the latter case, you find yourself caring about the person you’re tipping, empathizing with them and appreciating them, not merely what they produce. You’re giving them money not in exchange for something, but simply to enable them to keep doing what they’re doing, because it pleases you and you feel it makes your life richer.”

I really dig Kottke’s term “micropatron” as a way of labeling this phenomenon – it both harkens back to the older, pre-consumption model for arts funding and points toward the more distributed nature enabled by the Internet. Now, what I’m really curious about is how he’ll do from here; as I wrote previously, the key to successful patronage of any sort is the creation of an almost cooperative relationship between an artist and her patron(s) – we tip because it makes us feel good, not just because we want the product (because we’ll get the product either way). So, in the end, the “performer” isn’t just offering music/text/whatever, she’s also in a sense offering herself. Should be interesting to see if/how Kottke adapts his already-well-established blog identity to this new paradigm, and what impact that might have on his micropatronage experiment.

With that in mind, this post by Dorothea at Caveat Lector resonated. She writes:

“For the longest time (and to this day in some places), librarians created knowledge structures for other librarians. Today we’re getting downright resentful at the thought of putting others’ needs first, opening up our toyboxes…We need to turn some real usability experts loose on our stuff. Because our stuff…is really pretty bad…We’re thinking in terms of the data, not in terms of the user.”

This echoes a lot of the conversations I’ve been hearing among librarians (at times, I feel like “eavesdropping” is a more appropriate word for what I’ve been doing w/r/t the library world); there’s a crisis of purpose in that world, in a world where libraries have to compete with Google, Wikipedia, and other massively accessible information resources, users aren’t immediately going to libraries as their first choice for information.

At question, though, are the means that will enable those users to use that information (what Raymond Yee calls “Gather, Create, Share” tools). The natural thing for librarians to do is to start building such tools, but many have been finding that they’re not quite sure exactly what scholars and researchers want (to be fair, those users have been remarkably bad at actually communicating what they want and need), and one of the big discussions in the world of digital library tool-building seems to be whether to build tools themselves, or make resources available and leave the tool-building to users. That’s our argument at CHNM – since we’re users ourselves, we know better than librarians what historians need/want from information tools. Of course, as anyone who knows me will testify, I’m not exactly a normal historian, which raises the difficult question of whether we’re building tools for historians, or just tools for early-adopter, gearhead database-designing historian/programmers…

Now, I’m not somebody who buys into the technologically rah-rah, “everything’s different now that we have the internet!” sort of rhetoric, but it does seem to me that something worth noting has been happening – in short, a resurrection of the old patronage model, but on a grand and distributed scale. This isn’t anything new, of course – when I buy a CD from a musician whom I’ve just heard play at a local bar, I feel like I’m not just buying a commodified good, but rather that I’m helping to support his or her ability to make music. Now, it seems like some people are starting to use the internet to expand the reach of the metaphorical hat they leave out on the street, even as you get the sense that they’d be doing what they’re doing regardless of whether or what you toss in it, just like that musician at the local bar.

In a way, the crucial difference here is between buying and tipping. In the first case, you’re paying for a good or service, and feel no attachment toward the person producing it. In the latter case, you find yourself caring about the person you’re tipping, empathizing with them and appreciating them, not merely what they produce. You’re giving them money not in exchange for something, but simply to enable them to keep doing what they’re doing, because it pleases you and you feel it makes your life richer.

One might say that Howard Dean’s mammothly successful online fundraising campaign taps into this sort of ethic. It’s arguable that he’s been so successful not just because people are voting with their money, but because donors very explicitly see him as performing a valuable service, speaking for them and their views (or even just offering a contrary voice). They don’t just pay him, they identify and empathize with him, and they give money not in exchange for his services, but to enable him to continue doing what he does.

The interesting thing is that in a world where major corporations are trying to figure out how to force their users to pay for downloaded music, the patronage model seems to be taking hold in the world of words and ideas, inspiring people to willingly and happily click the “Donate” button and leave a tip, whether a few bucks or a new Sony computer.