Links/remix offer/book on amateurism
A bit late to the party, but I offered to do SPN and Smallville in the remix commentfic (remix must fit within comment) meme at 
bessemerprocess’s journal.
Game of Thrones attack ads.
Excellent essay on Ripley as corporate auditor/Weyland-Yutani as the real villain of the Alien franchise.
Jack Hitt, Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character: Let’s get this out of the way: Hitt does almost nothing to suggest that American amateurism is different from anyone else’s amateurism, though he does say it’s part of our self-image. (The quality of his evidence includes this century-hopping comparison of fictional archetypes: “The mad scientists of Europe spawned monsters. Our absentminded professors [don’t get why they’re amateurs, but ok] created flubber ….”) He includes women in his story, but only in more traditionally male amateur pursuits, though his author’s note indicates that he did research fan fiction. His account of the amateur identifies two kinds: “They are either outsiders mustering at some fortress of expertise hoping to scale the walls, or pioneers improvising in a frontier where no professionals exist.” I think that reductiveness has a gendered component. That said, this is a readable book about the wacky and the non-wacky. Hitt covers amateurism as a path to success as well as a path to doing nothing much in particular or even being affirmatively and damagingly wrong: in his example, amateur archeaologists who end up promoting racist narratives about early “Caucasian” migrations to North America. One of these guys decided that a skull he’d found must have looked just like Jean-Luc Picard, and sure enough the facial reconstruction ended up looking just like Patrick Stewart. He “suggested to the artist that he not include the ‘epicanthic fold’ of the Asian eye since leaving that out would be ‘neutral’”-an almost perfect indictment of “neutrality.”
I liked Hitt’s point that we often bemoan the demise of the amateur because some field or other is getting so specialized, but “each generation also discovers that what they thought were very expensive, highly unobtainable technologies suddenly turn into the next generation’s play toys.” Also, did you know that a kid in Michigan supposedly became the eighteenth amateur to create nuclear fission in his backyard?
Hitt is also fun to read about the payoffs from tinkering and failing. Discussing one woman who’s trying to genetically engineer yogurt to do various things (such as glow) in her spare time, he talks about her pleasure in finding older, cheaper ways to carry out parts of the process, and about the encouragement found in small victories when you don’t have a boss with a deadline for one big solution. “Amateurs are often fixing things, their own devices, so there is this constant reinforcement of feeling smart and competent.” Though, he points out, this can also lead to people spending their lives trying to make the one last tweak that will make the perpetual motion machine work. And Hitt emphasizes that amateurs (even the mostly male mechanical tinkerers of common tropes) actually tend to work in packs, cross-pollinating each others’ ideas.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
bessemerprocess’s journal.
Game of Thrones attack ads.
Excellent essay on Ripley as corporate auditor/Weyland-Yutani as the real villain of the Alien franchise.
Jack Hitt, Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character: Let’s get this out of the way: Hitt does almost nothing to suggest that American amateurism is different from anyone else’s amateurism, though he does say it’s part of our self-image. (The quality of his evidence includes this century-hopping comparison of fictional archetypes: “The mad scientists of Europe spawned monsters. Our absentminded professors [don’t get why they’re amateurs, but ok] created flubber ….”) He includes women in his story, but only in more traditionally male amateur pursuits, though his author’s note indicates that he did research fan fiction. His account of the amateur identifies two kinds: “They are either outsiders mustering at some fortress of expertise hoping to scale the walls, or pioneers improvising in a frontier where no professionals exist.” I think that reductiveness has a gendered component. That said, this is a readable book about the wacky and the non-wacky. Hitt covers amateurism as a path to success as well as a path to doing nothing much in particular or even being affirmatively and damagingly wrong: in his example, amateur archeaologists who end up promoting racist narratives about early “Caucasian” migrations to North America. One of these guys decided that a skull he’d found must have looked just like Jean-Luc Picard, and sure enough the facial reconstruction ended up looking just like Patrick Stewart. He “suggested to the artist that he not include the ‘epicanthic fold’ of the Asian eye since leaving that out would be ‘neutral’”-an almost perfect indictment of “neutrality.”
I liked Hitt’s point that we often bemoan the demise of the amateur because some field or other is getting so specialized, but “each generation also discovers that what they thought were very expensive, highly unobtainable technologies suddenly turn into the next generation’s play toys.” Also, did you know that a kid in Michigan supposedly became the eighteenth amateur to create nuclear fission in his backyard?
Hitt is also fun to read about the payoffs from tinkering and failing. Discussing one woman who’s trying to genetically engineer yogurt to do various things (such as glow) in her spare time, he talks about her pleasure in finding older, cheaper ways to carry out parts of the process, and about the encouragement found in small victories when you don’t have a boss with a deadline for one big solution. “Amateurs are often fixing things, their own devices, so there is this constant reinforcement of feeling smart and competent.” Though, he points out, this can also lead to people spending their lives trying to make the one last tweak that will make the perpetual motion machine work. And Hitt emphasizes that amateurs (even the mostly male mechanical tinkerers of common tropes) actually tend to work in packs, cross-pollinating each others’ ideas.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.