- July 2010
- June 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
In the Spring issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas in a piece entitled “The Foolishness of Crowds“, Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, pours scorn on the thoughts of New York lawyer Beth Simone Noveck. Noveck, a social media enthusiast, quotes George Bernard Shaw, who claimed that professionals conspire against the laity, to promote the idea of wiki government: policy making using the anyone-can-edit techniques familiar from Wikipedia. Keen counters that it is these very techniques that are a conspiracy against the professionals.
Keen‘s point about wiki government is that it risks being hijacked by ideologues who want to impose their own agenda on policy and government. To the extent that such a thing might already have happened, I wouldn’t want it to continue online, but Keen is just too enthusiastic in his criticism of the power of participation that is social media.
His biggest complaint is that professionals cannot afford to give away their specialized labour for free. But the truth is that the non-pros can’t afford to let the pros be the only ones putting a price tag on their services either. There’s a difference between selling useful knowledge for a fair price and making a profit through a monopoly on information. What a pro knows may actually be worth what you or I are willing to pay, but it can also be worth a lot less. The trick is to find the balance.
We should never forget that there is always an asymmetry in information — online media simply makes it easier to diagnose and address. Expertise should feel obliged to continuously improve, refine and prove its knowledge. The population is more informed and thus more suspicious. Lobbyists can no longer pass as pure experts, and experts must question the structure that produced both their ideas and ideologies more closely — they must be more critical about their own content, a boon to both their studies and their students. Everyone has an agenda. Attract an informed audience willing to consider yours.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL