I am far too tired to write anything.

However....

I plan on entertaining a few ideas in the near future, such as...

(the relationship between) Social Networking Theory, Cronyism, and Corruption. The idea is that if personal relationship-based social institutions are somehow more powerful or natural or valid in the minds of social networking theorists than are democratic or law-based ones then we're getting close to advocating for a more corrupt society. If I work on this I get to read stuff from danah boyd, Phil Windley, and others.

The Virtues of Entrenchment. This could also be "the economics of entrenchment". The basic point is that entrenchment has been given a bad name over the years by management theorists, yet, much more than the theories that try to undermine it, entrenchment is the means by which corporations operate, careers are built, and success is measured. This idea is similar to the Social Networking Theory and Corruption idea, but perhaps defends an opposite moral thesis.

I dunno, it's spring, maybe I'll think of something else.

The Worrisome Spread of Amateur Expertise Online

Experts have expressed concern about the increasing problem of people offering their opinions online as if they themselves were experts, though having no more than read one book or spent a few hours reading blogs. The spread of pseudo-expert opinion, it is feared, could cause a drop in the credibility of the internet as a technological must-have, or worse, could undermine the public's confidence in the value of expert opinion.

"At one time," one expert was quoted as saying, "the newspapers were about all people had for their information. And television, of course. Now, with the internet, anyone can make a bad cellphone video of themselves, post it on YouTube, and become the next Edward R. Murrow.

The Rise of the Blogs
Blogs are to journalism what amateur photography is to professional photography. Or perhaps some expert can come up with a better analogy. Perhaps this is a job for a (flash) mob.

The leading proponent of worrying about amateurs discussing mere knowledge as if it were expertise is Andrew Keen. I have not read his book, but nevertheless I know all about it, having heard him interviewed in a podcast. Furthermore, Andrew Keen has no significant credentials of his own, so it is curious that he is concerned about the mixing of non-accredited opinions with those of professionals, unless he's simply trying to use the tools available to amateurs to pass himself off as something better.

4/14/08.

I wrote this orginally as a joke, but real-world examples are not difficult to discover. I'll try to catalog a few here.

4/14/08 - a slashdotted attack on Wikipedia from an academic dean, who claims that the readily available interactive information in that resource is a scourge among knowledge consumers, who now uncritically trust what they read rather than having no information readily available and simply speculating as was common practice before google, wikipedia and the like.

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/14/1220243.shtml
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1828979092


4/14/08 - today David Weinberg blogged about Stephen Johnson's book Emergence, which likens flash mobs and other grassroots phenomena. Johnson wrote first about leaderless social movements and their self-organizing behaviors, then moved on to an apt analysis of Howard Dean's surprising rise to popularity by those same means.

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2008/04/14/emergent-politics-was-steven-johnson-right/

The dialectical struggle between centralized entrenched power and coincidental self-organizing opposition to it may prove to be closely related to this topic, as "real" experts battle the emergence of "fake experts" or "amateurs" encroaching on their turf.

This suggests to me that a lot of what the "real experts" believe to be the keys to their Expert status (some claim to have worked hard in the past or at present, time and money invested in the trappings of one's social position, countless hours spent at parties with boring people you don't really like but must fraternize with for professional reasons) are really not credentials but
simply random existential life-experiences.

In other words, expertise cannot be self-conferred, but truly is a social contract which must be negotiated both with the body of material one claims or desires expertise in and with the body of "non-experts" who are to regard one as an expert.

In today's complex world this has been done too often by proxy: being a scientist often gets one branded an expert, but this status can be called into question by the possibility of highly paid PR flacks claiming to write "peer reviews" refuting the assertions made by the scientist / expert, and when this happens the scientist, less capable a publicist than his opponent, may find little ground to stand on, his audience having had nothing to do with conferring his "scientist" credentials in the first place, now unsure if their naive trust was misplaced.

On social networking:

Nobody likes social networking any more. So early zeroes. This is the late zeroes. So what are people doing post-social-networking?

Post-social-networking.

It's important that the term is double-hyphenated so it refers to what comes after social networking, not to a kind of networking destined to supersede the social. I can't exactly grasp what "post-social" would mean.

After an extreme day of social networking, I'm tired. So then I look forward to some post-social-networking chill time.

I can't figure out any compelling reason to create public information on social networking networks, but I still maintain it out there. It has pictures, it has feeds, it's interactive, sort of a master tamagochi that takes charge of me rather than me tending it. People can send me stuff, like e-mail. But unlike e-mail social networks are places to represent identity, not only to send messages. So I can put up photos and stuff and show other people things I'm working on.

So this is why an otherwise lame-ass way to spend time seems to the user to be sort of interesting. The reason previous social-networking tools such as phones and e-mail now seem undesirable is that they lack interactivity beyond their obvious basic functions. Not like you can't put games on a phone, but that's not as good as a camera because a phone is a social-networking device: it's for calling people and for them to call you. Sending a crappy picture is just another type of phone call, possibly more cool than just a regular phone call. But calling a person on a phone is automatic, lacking in richness, kind of boring, but it can't get that much richer and still be a phone call. An e-mail, a text message, other transactional communication is similar. Efficient, but kind of constraining. That's the old kind of social networking. Pale0-social (Even more paleo would be bulletin boards, an ancient but oddly perfect social networking tool if you don't mind text-only).

Advanced interactivity is what makes social networking different. Everyone is familiar with the interactive qualities of software, the way the software responds to actions, the impression you get of it as you try to use it. Ever since the early psychology game programs like Eliza, interaction has been an interesting problem for AI, and has found practical application in numerous areas.

Being networked to other people is the most obvious interactive component of social networking, but the medium or infrastructure has its own role in facilitating this. At one time minimizing the interference of programming artifacts on the user was a goal for some programmers: getting out of the way of users' natural ways of working. Others preferred to ignore those considerations, instead creating ugly awkward software.

Thinking now has shifted to encourage a more engaged interactive approach: the program teaches you how to use it. The social networking site keeps asking you to do different kinds of things: install an application, join a group, vote on some thing or other, and otherwise share your information. But you don't always have to do what's asked of you, numerous other activities are available: upload photos, investigate more about the site, look for other people, blog. And your choices made permanent and displayed to your social network, so you and other group members share experiences.