The rise of Web 2.0 has pushed the amateur to the forefront of public discourse, public policy and media scholarship. Typically non-salaried, non-specialist and untrained in media production, amateur producers are now seen as key drivers of the creative economy. But how do the activities of today and tomorrow's citizen journalists, fan fiction writers and bedroom musicians connect with longer traditions of extra-institutional media production? How has the connection between professional production and amateur creativity changed over time, and how will it change in the future? What categories of authorship are at work in amateur cultural production? And how have shifts in law and policy worked to construct amateurism in relation to its purported others? This edited collection provides a much-needed interdisciplinary contextualisation of amateur media before and after Web 2.0. Surveying the institutional, economic and legal construction of the amateur media producer via a series of case studies, it features contributions from experts in the fields of law, economics, media studies and literary studies based in the US and Australia.
Each section of the book contains a detailed case study on a selected topic, followed by two further pieces providing additional analysis and commentary on the topic. By structuring the book in this way it offers nuanced understanding of the functions of extra-institutional forms of cultural production and their co-constitutive relationships to institutionalised media industries. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of law, economics, media and communications studies, cultural studies, and literary studies.