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.
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