Amateur Media and Participatory Culture

"Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures aims to sketch the boundary line between today's amateur media practice and the cannons of professional media and film practice. Identifying various feasible interpretative frameworks, from historical to anthropological perspectives, it helps develop a critical language able to cope with amateur and new media's rapid technological and interpretative developments. Conscious of the fact that amateur media continue to be seen as the benchmark of visual records of authentic rather than mass-media derived events, Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Susan Aasman pay particular attention to the ways in which diverse sets of concepts of amateur media have now merged across global visual narratives and everyday communication protocols. Building on key research questions and content analysis in media and communication studies, they have assessed differences between professional and amateur media productions based on the ways in which the 'originators' of an image have been influenced by, or have challenged their context of production. This proposes that technical skills, degrees of staging and/or censoring visual information, and patterns in media socialization define central differences between professional and amateur media production, distribution and consumption. The book's methodical and interdisciplinary approach provides valuable insights regarding the ways in which visual experiences and memory are currently shaped, stored and re-distributed across new media technologies and visual channels"--