Verso Books Paperback English
Amateurs!
How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters
By Joanna Walsh
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<i>Amateurs! </i>is the story of how YOU created internet culture and why it matters. Web 2.0 invited users to create: blogs, vlogs, tweets, memes and more. For the first time in history, art became *the* fundamental form of communication. What started as fun became a currency--vital for finding friends, work and love--then, as meatspace job security eroded, work. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge for use, selling our creations back to us. Whatever we're making online, it isn't amateur any more.<br><br>If creative acts online have facilitated AI's environmental impact, alt-right politics, neoliberal economics, they are also at the heart of effective activism, community-building, political solidarities. What we make online is political, not only in content but because it's here in this public forum, because so much of it comes from people who never had a voice in any public forum before. An aesthetic revolution as big as modernism, internet amateurism has changed how we think, talk about and see our world. It asks us to re-evaluate not only what art, and what an artist is, but the divide between the amateur and professional itself.
<i>Amateurs! </i>is the story of how YOU created internet culture and why it matters. Web 2.0 invited users to create: blogs, vlogs, tweets, memes and more. For the first time in history, art became *the* fundamental form of communication. What started as fun became a currency--vital for finding friends, work and love--then, as meatspace job security eroded, work. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge for use, selling our creations back to us. Whatever we're making online, it isn't amateur any more.<br><br>If creative acts online have facilitated AI's environmental impact, alt-right politics, neoliberal economics, they are also at the heart of effective activism, community-building, political solidarities. What we make online is political, not only in content but because it's here in this public forum, because so much of it comes from people who never had a voice in any public forum before. An aesthetic revolution as big as modernism, internet amateurism has changed how we think, talk about and see our world. It asks us to re-evaluate not only what art, and what an artist is, but the divide between the amateur and professional itself.