Week 3 reading log

Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas, 2015, ‘Work’ in The Informal Media Economy, Polity Press, Cambridge UK, ch.3.

In The Informal Media Economy Lobato and Thomas point out the debates of labour in culture, creative and media industries. In modern society, the freelance workers become more and more in media and creative industries. Lobato and Thomas enable us to think will the freelance writing sites devalue the writing profeesion? Will it Provide a platforms for amateurs? What ethics should be considered and what problems will have in using non-professional labour? Those questions both can be considered in different perspectives. For example, depending on some professional or academic creative media workers perspective, they probably question about the professsion of them. For the freelancer, as amateurs, they got a chance to develop their hobby, they have flexible hours and freedom creativity.

However, the authors describe the main concerns of informal media industry, which is unpredictability, insecure and low pay for workers. Honestly, this is the cruel fact for all the media students who want to contribute to media industry in future. Actually the most of Chinese parents prefer their child to work in government, hospital and law office, rather than film, TV, Radio or other media industries. They assert there is the lack of stability of those jobs. But for the people who is really interested in those realms, like me, even we know the potential predictability, insecure of the job, we still want to try it. There is no any job is so easy to do in the beginning. And the passion we have for the job enables us have a spirit to conquer the problems. It is so lucky if we can do a thing we loved.