Borrowed from the Blog New Thinking

I grew up in a small farming community in Ireland. You never
questioned the expert. The teacher, the priest and the doctor
ruled. The idea that they might ever be wrong was not even an
idea.

Well, the teacher, priest and doctor don’t have it so easy in
the Ireland of today. They are being actively questioned. When
they get it wrong, it is being clearly pointed out to them. The
good ones embrace this new environment and are becoming better
by continuously listening and learning. The bad ones get
exposed.

The Web is where ordinary people go to opine, to organize, to
debate, and to hear what other people just like them think. The
Web is the Global Square in the Global Village. It’s very
empowering.

The early years of the Web have seen a revolt against the
expert. This has reflected a wider societal shift towards the
belief that ordinary people have important things to say. We’re
not just consumers anymore; we’re also producers.

“The individual user has been king on the Internet, but the
pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information
vetted by professionals, Tony Dokoupil wrote in a Newsweek
article, Revenge of the Experts, published in March 2008.

According to Dokoupil, “the expert is back. The revival comes
amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web.” But has
the expert ever really gone away?

Wikipedia, on the surface, may seem like the ultimate experiment
in the wisdom of crowds. However, as Dokoupil later states,
“Last summer researchers in Palo Alto, Calif., uncovered secret
elitism at Wikipedia when they found that 1 percent of the
reference site’s users make more than 50 percent of its edits.”

The Web has never been the enemy of the expert. What it ushered
in is the ability to find out what “people like me” have to say.
What was their experience with this product? Did they like this
particular book? Is this as nice a hotel as its website says it
is?

The Web has also allowed the up-and-coming experts and artists
to state their case for why they have created something
interesting and worthwhile. YouTube and MySpace would fall flat
if there wasn’t a way to allow the cream to rise to the top.
(Sometimes just the weird and quirky rises, but that’s okay
too.)

I like websites like CNET and Amazon because they have both
expert and customer reviews. That’s a nice balance. As the Web
matures, we are thus likely to see “a hybrid approach built
around entirely new business models,” as experts at Wharton
state, in an article entitled “The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A
Tug of War over the Future of Media,” published in March 2008.

The Web is a network and strength in a network is about
connectedness and openness. 200 years ago, an expert could claim
to be an authority on a particular subject. Today, an expert is
someone who is expert in the network; connecting, sharing,
sifting, ordering, and always taking the pulse of the wisdom of
the experts and the crowd.

The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of
Media

Revenge of the Experts