ABSTRACT
Amateur media content is available on multiple media platforms as family vlogs, personal webcam videos, eyewitness reports, or video embedded in Tweets. With amateur media being ubiquitous, it is interesting to explore their history and follow up their traces, from marginal to mainstream. By surveying the history of amateur media and mapping the relationships between emerging media technologies and changing amateur media practices, this chapter explores why and how people choose to use specific technologies at particular moments in time and how economic, political, social and cultural factors influenced these choices. A history of amateur media should consider not only people’s relation with media technologies, but also the significance yoof these assigned technologies for them. Some people chose amateur media as a technology of memory, recording precious moments of domestic life. Others embraced amateur media as creative aesthetic practices that enabled them to become dedicated hobbyists investing time and money, acquiring advanced skills. Another option was to appropriate them as an alternative to mainstream media, be it in terms of radical political and democratic potential or as a playing field for experimental avant-garde groups. And, finally, amateur media were used as an apt technology that suited new forms of self-expression that could even generate money. These rich and sometimes deeply contrasting aspirations and applications make the term ‘amateur’ a contested concept. So, charting the transformations and tracing the emergence of varieties of these complex relations not only between media technologies and their uses but also their media content and cultural and political meanings can help to clarify ongoing responses to new technologies and its different affordances.
