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.