Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has an issue devoted to the American amateur, called The Amateur’s Hour. Jack Hitt, a great news magazine and radio reporter, wrote an article about a group of eccentric amateurs who enter a contest to design new space gear for NASA. And Jonathan Dee writes an article about the thousands of mostly anonymous volunteers (i.e. amateurs) that strive to keep Wikipedia honest, neutral and accurate.

When I opened the magazine, I thought, “Oh, good, maybe there will be an article about amateur filmmakers…” thus revealing my one-track mind. Indeed, there was no such article in the Times, but the focus on amateurs could also apply to the latest ten years in the documentary film world and the online video world in general, of course. The vast majority of those posting original videos on YouTube, are, by definition, amateurs. They didn’t go to film school, they are not recognized as filmmakers by some professional body, but of course, they are making films, so calling them anything else would be a misnomer. There has been a revived tension between professional and amateur documentary filmmakers since digital video brought the barrier to entryway down in the last decade or so. We at Arts Engine bridge this divide; we celebrate the video work of both amateurs and professionals, and we don’t sweat the distinction much.

I can appreciate the tension that exists: On the one hand, I consider myself a “professional” filmmaker, but I certainly started out as an amateur. I didn’t go to film school, I experimented with making films when I didn’t really know what I was doing, and eventually I started working on other people’s films in order to learn how it was done. And somehow now I consider myself a professional. Hitt is writing a book about amateurs, the Times tells us, and in his article Hitt hints at some of the material in the book when he writes “Ever since Benjamin Franklin broke with his apprenticeship in Boston as a teenager and recreated himself as a freethinking and fearless inventor… amateurism has taken on different connotations in this country. Old World use of the word “amateur” intimated lower-class status, even incompetency, but in America, the land of second acts, “amateur” has accrued some of the more positive meanings we associate with the autodidact”. Hitt goes on to remind us of our national fascination with amateurs who make it big — no better example of it than “American Idol”.

Right now amateurs are giving media professionals a run for their money with all the popular amateur videos that are flooding online website. And whenever there is a big wave of popular amateurism like there is now, it makes professionals sweat. Not only do popular amateurs make professionals seem less impressive (anyone can do that), they also threaten to drive professionals out of work. Generally, when professionals are put on the defensive like this, they react by claiming that amateurs are not the real deal. Angela Tucker touched on this point in her blog entry about Web 2.0 when she referenced Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture. I suspect Keen’s book will continue generate a lot of interest because it speaks to all those who feel that YouTube videos are not made by “real” filmmakers, bloggers aren’t “real” journalists and wiki-everythings are going to misinform the world.

My feeling is while I can sympathize with professionals’ fears that amateurs will take over the world, and while I value the experience that professionals in all branches of media offer, we professionals would do well to remember that a) most of us were amateurs once and b) amateurs are where a lot of the best new cultural and technological ideas come from. May we both learn from each other!