Institute For The Future

"Notes on ""The Pro-Am Revolution"""

A while ago, I noted the publication by Demos, a London-based think-tank, of Charles Leadbetter and Paul Miller's The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society (a PDF is available here). In the eight months since the report came out, CK Prahalad and Eric von Hippel have both published books on user co-creation or user-driven innovation (the term varies); blogging continues to turn perfectly nice people in zombies; and podcasting has started to take off. (The report is also part of a larger shift towards recognizing the renaissance of the amateur.) In other words, Leadbetter and Miller's work has become more, not less, prescient.

I recently reread it, as part of my work on the future of science and technology, and am impressed at how good it is. I think there are a couple things they don't spend enough time on-- the way that really outstanding tools for creative work have followed Moore's Law-like increases in power per dollar, most notably-- but overall, it holds up well. Here's the big idea:

 

The twentieth century was shaped by the rise of professionals in most walks of life. From education, science and medicine, to banking, business and sports, formerly amateur activities became more organised, and knowledge and procedures were codified and regulated. As professionalism grew, often with hierarchical organisations and formal systems for accrediting knowledge, so amateurs came to be seen as second-rate. Amateurism came to be to a term of derision. Professionalism was a mark of seriousness and high standards.

But in the last two decades a new breed of amateur has emerged: the Pro-Am, amateurs who work to professional standards. These are not the gentlemanly amateurs of old.... The Pro-Ams are knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked, by new technology. The twentieth century was shaped by large hierarchical organisations with professionals at the top. Pro-Ams are creating new, distributed organisational models that will be innovative, adaptive and low-cost....

[Further], when Pro-Ams are networked together they can have a huge impact on politics and culture, economics and development. Pro-Ams can achieve things that until recently only large, professional organisations could achieve. (12)

 

Full notes on the report are in the extended entry.

Chapter 1, Pro-Am Power

Looks at rap music, open source software, the Jubilee debt campaign, and The Sims as examples of Pro-Am innovation.

One science that has seen a recent revival of amateurs is astronomy. In astronomy, "in the last two decades three linked innovations have turned astronomy into an open source, Pro-Am activity. A disruptive innovation [the Dobsonian telescope and CCD cameras] made powerful telescopes cheap enough for the average astronomer:" a large Dobsonian and CCD gives pictures that challenge 200" (14) telescopes. Consequently, "the Earth acquired hundreds of thousands of new eyes, probing deep space, recording events that would have gone unnoticed by the much smaller body of professionals. This distributed capacity for exploration and observation was vastly enhanced by the internet." (15)

Chapter 2, The Pro-Am Idea

 

A Pro-Am pursues an activity as an amateur, mainly for the love of it, but sets a professional standard. Pro-Ams are unlikely to earn more than a small portion of their income from their pastime but they pursue it with the dedication and commitment associated with a professional. For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory; it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations. (20)

Pro-Ams... have a strong sense of vocation; they use recognised public standards to assess performance and formally validate skills; they form self-regulating communities, which provide people with a sense of community and belonging; they produce non-commodity products and services; they are well versed in a body of knowledge and skill, which carries with it a sense of tradition and identity. (22)

 

Chapter 3: Measuring the Pro-Am Sector

 

Our estimate is that perhaps 58 per cent of the British population engage in some kind of activity that could be described as Pro-Am. That is the proportion of the population who engage in an amateur activity regularly and rate their skills as reasonably good: they see themselves as Pro-Ams. This estimate, based on self-assessment of skills, may be an overestimate. The true, 'hard-core' Pro-Am population is likely to be a subset of this. But even if that were a half of the total Pro-Am group identified in our survey, that would still mean at least 25 per cent of the population see themselves as Pro-Am. (30)

The growth of Pro-Am activity does not necessarily imply stronger social capital. Many of the most popular Pro-Am activities can be quite individualistic: gardening, DIY, writing, photography, playing a musical instrument. Other Pro-Am activities – volunteering, campaigning, organising sports and social clubs – are more social. This basic distinction between 'private' Pro-Ams (gardening, DIY, writing) and 'social' Pro-Ams (volunteering, club organisers, performers) will be important in guiding policies to promote different kinds of Pro-Am activities.

Participation in Pro-Am activities is heavily slanted towards well educated, middle class people with incomes above £30,000 per year. There are some exceptions to this: fishing, for example, is largely a working class pastime. In some activities – volunteering for example – the class balance is more mixed. But as a rule people with financial, social and educational resources are far more likely to engage in Pro- Am activities than those without these resources. (32)

 

Chapter 4, The Pro-Am Ethic

Rising to the level of a Pro-Am requires "a substantial investment in 'cultural capital'." (39)

 

The more we learn, the more confident we become about an activity – astronomy, playing tennis, acting – and so the more pleasure we are likely to get from it. Consumption becomes a nowledge-intensive activity.

Pro-Ams enjoy acquiring cultural capital: they enjoy immersion in a body of knowledge held by a community. But it's not just one way. They also like passing it on, being part of a flow of knowledge through a community. Many of the Pro-Ams teach others, or informally pass on skills to peers. (40)

 

This kind of intense involvement has unintended but significant benefits:

 

[P]eople who have more 'serious' pursuits are more likely to feel focus, a sense of power, joy, value, integration and wholeness than those who consume by shopping.... Participation in serious leisure improves health and well-being. Pro-Am leisure activities generate more social benefits pound-for pound than passive and casual leisure. (41)

Pro-Am activities also bring social benefits for those involved. They have a sense of self-worth and a place in society. Vertical social mobility – measured by income and wealth – has not become markedly easier in modern Britain. Yet horizontal social mobility – the opportunity for people to adopt different lifestyles according to their interests – has increased a great deal, at all levels of income, as society has become better off. Limited vertical social mobility, combined with massive horizontal social mobility, creates a society that is simultaneously more fluid and open than it was, while being just as stratified. Pro-Ams are horizontally mobile through their acquisition and deployment of cultural capital. (42)

That cultural capital also provides them with a sense of belonging. Pro-Ams need other members of their community to learn from, play with, compete against, perform to. Pro-Am organisations help to generate social capital, lasting relationships and friendships, that help to provide a social glue and basis for cooperation. Pro-Am tribes could become more important as the traditional family and local communities decline.... Sharing Pro-Am knowledge and interests is the new basis for community." (42)

People with Pro-Am skills tend to be more resilient. A shadow Pro- Am career is a form of insurance: everyone should have Pro-Am skills to fall back on should their formal and professional career run into the sand and leave them stranded. (42)

 

Chapter 5, How Pro-Ams Organize

"Hard-core Pro-Am activities are often social in nature: Pro-Ams do it with one another, often in public. It is virtually impossible to engage in a Pro-Am activity solo." (44) Skills transmission, accreditation, peer recognition, social bonding, and public communication are all fundamentally social activities.

What tools do they rely upon?

• The Internet is critical for group formation and communication.
• Mobile phones are important for smart mob formation (and no less significant, for doing the sort of real-time bricolage that defines the lives of people with multiple demands and interests).
• They're also beneficiaries of beneficiaries of an "explosion of specialist magazines, catering to specialist tastes and interests," (45) that serve as tools for sharing skills and building public, common identities.
• Marketing is another tool for group formation. "Many Pro-Am activities have become brand zones. People display their attachment to climbing or cycling, surfing or skiing by wearing particular brands of clothing." (45)
• Finally, in some fields at least, alliances with professionals are a defining and binding mechanism.

Chapter 6, How Society Benefits From Pro-Ams

Social Benefits. "Social Pro-Ams help to build social capital: networks of relationships that allow people to collaborate, share ideas and take risks together. Social capital can help glue a society together and allow people to trust one another more easily, thus helping them to adjust to change collaboratively and share risks.... They create strong bonds around their interests, but because these interests span different communities they can link people from very different walks of life." (49)

"These social benefits may be particularly important for people over the age of 45. Our interviews with Pro-Ams highlighted how many came back to a 'parallel' or 'shadow' career later in life, as their first, formal and professional career came to an end.... As society ages and the healthy lifespan expands, so it will become more important for people to be able to engage in stretching and challenging Pro-Am activities in later life." (50)

Economic Benefits. "Pro-Ams play an increasingly critical economic role, particularly as a source of innovation.... Amateurs have a long track record of innovation, especially in emerging fields which are too young for there to be an organised and professional body of knowledge or too marginal to warrant the attention of companies or universities." (51)

Indeed, "Pro-Am communities are the new R & D labs of the digital economy." (64) Pro-Ams play three roles in the innovation process:

1. They can be disruptive innovators. "Dedicated amateurs pursue new ideas even when it appears there is no money to be made. That is why they are a persistent source for disruptive innovations." (52)
2. They can be leading adopters/reinventors. "The more technologically radical the innovation the more difficult it is to say in advance what the innovation is for. It may be impossible for the 'authors' of the innovation to predict exactly how it will be used. It is down to the consumers to work out what a new technology is really for." (52) Essentially, Pro-Ams are more likely to invest the time necessary to come up with new uses for interesting technologies.
3. Pro-Ams are service innovators. They're more knowledgeable, inventive and demanding than other consumers, and consequently are likely to be sources of innovations in services.

Political Benefits. The ability-- both technical and psychological- of people to organize and innovate cannot but be good for democracy. Conversely, the level of Pro-Am engagement in a society is a good measure of its freedom.

 

The fact that people can pursue amateur hobbies and interests without state censorship or interference is a good measure of freedom. People with passions that draw them into civic life are more likely to have a stake in a democratic process that defends this freedom of association. As Freeman Dyson the physicist put it in a New York Review of Books article: 'In almost all the varied walks of life, amateurs have more freedom to experiment and innovate. The fraction of a population who are amateurs is a good measure of the freedom of a society.' (54)

 

Chapter 8, The Future of Pro-Ams

Professionals – in science and medicine, war and politics, education and welfare – shaped the twentieth century through their knowledge, authority and institutions. They will still be vital in the twenty-first century. But the new driving force, creating new streams of knowledge, new kinds of organisations, new sources of authority, will be the Pro-Ams. (71)