Bunch of Amateurs Read Free

Prize Foundation (space tourism), Congress (hydrogen energy), Al Gore (carbon emissions abatement), and even Google ($20 million reward for a robot that can get to the moon and explore).
    There is also a steady stream of interest in weekend hobby clubs, where Americans have long retreated to tinker—depending on the decade—with their radios, remote-control vehicles, computers, and robots. The Internet has set loose a massive new style: open-source amateur collaborations that completely restructure entire disciplines. My own field of journalism is being thoroughly undermined, crashed, and rebuilt by the blogosphere, Slate, the Daily Beast, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. There is now open talk among the most fuddy-duddy editors that the dead-tree format—i.e., the newspaper—may be the illuminated manuscript of the twenty-first century. The old financial models are crumbling. Between 2000 and 2008, Craigslist alone eliminated about 49 percent of newspaper revenue that oncecame in from classified ads—as bloggers swarm every news story with fact-checking and commentary. They’ve created a heightened sense of being observed and have fundamentally altered the way journalism now gets reported and written.
    There is almost no field that isn’t experiencing similar tectonic quakes. Just casting about, it’s not hard to find outsider collaborations. Amateur weather freaks, “storm spotters” who now communicate online, have long been relied upon by local governments and are acknowledged by the National Weather Service as “the Nation’s first line of defense against severe weather.” The world of biodiesel (not to mention the latest emblem of American freedom—the solar-powered car) has launched a thousand backyard inventors, as well as roving salesmen peddling devices that home-brew gasoline from table scraps. Google maps have inspired a new generation of self-appointed spies to scout enemy landscapes. Do-it-yourself builders of submarines, or “personal submersibles,” now explore the ocean floor ( PSUBS.org ). Thiago Olson is a kid in Oakland Township, Michigan, who is now classified as the eighteenth amateur to create nuclear fusion in his backyard. It’s the number 18 that’s arresting.
    Once you start looking for it, the only real shocker is how ubiquitous a figure the aspiring amateur is in America and yet how seemingly invisible these people are in our journalistic media.
    The title of the nation’s most watched program—an amateur hour, mind you—captures it:
American Idol
. The amateur breaking out and getting recognized—that is our secular God. We are the land of fresh starts
and
second acts; the promised land of immigrants starting anew.
    The elevation of the amateur is not just this season’s top-rated TV show. Prime time is now jammed with knockoffs and spinoffs of
American Idol
(
America’s Got Talent
,
America’s Next Top Model
,
Project Runway
,
Dancing with the Stars
,
The Apprentice
,
The Voice
). Before
American Idol
, which discovered Kelly Clarkson, there was
Star Search
, the show responsible for Britney Spears. But the pedigreeof such programming goes way back, possibly all the way back. In the 1970s, the amateur show had already been such a staple that its parody was a huge hit.
The Gong Show
was straight-up ridicule of the genre (and yet managed to discover PeeWee Herman, Boxcar Willie, and Andrea McArdle—the first of the ginger ’fros who played Little Orphan Annie).
    Before that was
Amateur Night at the Apollo
, which gave us Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey. At that time, there was another glut of these shows. One could also watch
Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour
, a primetime show that launched the career of Gladys Knight and Pat Boone. The other big one was called the
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
, where we first saw performers ranging from Patsy Cline to Lenny Bruce.
    Mack got his television show because he had been the band leader for a radio show called
Major Bowes’