In the history of Japanese television, the 1970s and 1980s are a time when educational and cultural programs on hobbies thrived. While it has been explained as a shift from social education programs to lifelong learning programs, the meaning of "hobbies" as a subject matter itself had not been clarified. Therefore, this study attempted to characterize the content of these programs by using the analytical concept of serious leisure and focusing on the characteristic representation of hobbies. Specifically, the program footage, textbooks, and newspaper advertisements for "Introduction to Fishing" and "Introduction to Camera Techniques," two programs that aired in 1980 on

In media studies, the term, “amateur” has attracted attention as a subject who creates media or as an object created by media. Previous studies on the latter aspect tend to fall into a short-sighted conclusion that “everyone can become an amateur with the advent of new media.” To tackle this problem analytically, we propose a perspective that sees people become amateurs as a result of learning. Based on this perspective, we arrange three research questions to be explored: (1) what is the function of media that enables learners to become amateurs? (2) what kind of amateurs can people become? and (3) what is the scale of people who can become amateurs? Taking up the related research from various disciplines, we insist on exploring these questions considering the relationships between them.