A Radical History of the Internet as a place of creativity: where aesthetics has become a currency and the cost is being online.
Amateurs! 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.
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.
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End and Break*up she also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as "a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers" and currently runs @noentry_arts.
A Radical History of the Internet as a place of creativity: where aesthetics has become a currency and the cost is being online.
Amateurs! 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.
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.
Author
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End and Break*up she also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as "a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers" and currently runs @noentry_arts.
