“That withered
paradigm”
“There
is something about the Web,” writes Peter Walsh (2003), “that makes the idea of
the expert seem withered, even disreputable and laughable.” Walsh’s article, appearing in the anthology
of new media related essays entitled Democracy
and New Media, calls into question the ‘expert paradigm’ and its relevancy
on the Internet. In the article, Walsh
(2003) sets out to define the expert paradigm, identify a few key points of its
origins (though not a complete history of the concept), and link its disruption
with advances in communication technology starting from around the time of the printing
press.
According
to Walsh (2003), the expert paradigm is one that requires a body of knowledge,
and particularly an abstract knowledge that has some predictive aura surrounding
it. This sort of body of knowledge lends
itself easily to religious knowledge, especially in the form of the Church in
Western cultures. This sort of expert paradigm also has an “interior and
exterior, an outer group of laypersons and an inner group of experts” (pp.
366).
Maintaining this system requires
the establishment of certain rules that restrict access to the group’s
knowledge and regulate the amount of access that different levels of members
have to that knowledge base. But the part
that I found most significant in Walsh’s (2003) defining points of the expert
paradigm, was that Walsh identifies that the expert paradigm is “inherently
unstable. [The expert paradigm] is constantly threatened by factions and turf
battles from within and by skepticism or jealousy of its privileged status from
without” (pp. 367).
The problem that the expert
paradigm faces is that with the advancement and dissemination of communication
technologies, those fault lines created by the competing factions from both
inside and outside of the inner-circles are made all the more deeper and visible
for everyone to see. As Walsh (2003)
notes, “important to the Reformation was the fact that Luther made use of a
developing new technology and printed his views” (pp. 367). The difference today, with the Internet, is
that not only can everyone see these fault lines, but anyone can participate in
their expansion. The lines between
expert and non-expert quickly become blurred as we lose focus of the author (if
one can even be identified) and we cannot see their identifying insignia.
In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger (2007) writes about
the Great Wizard of Oz assuming a great and terrifying persona in order to
capture enough pathos and ethos that his subjects are likely to equate his
voice with absolute truth (pp. 140).
Weinberger (2007) is also writing about “truth and authority” and how
the boundaries have shifted in the digital age.
In this case, the website Wikipedia is Weiberger’s (2007) golden example
of a site that “gives up on being an Oz-like authority and helps us better
decide what to believe” (pp. 141).
The way in which Wikipedia disrobes
itself of being the authoritative voice of truth, according to Weinberger
(2007), is that Wikipedia is up front about its many possible weaknesses in a
series of notices concerning the disputable accuracy of certain articles. The result of the expert paradigm being so
usurped is that, as Weinberger (2007) claims, “deciding what to believe is now
our burden” (pp. 143). The advancement
of communication technologies has resulted in a time in which the information
seeker herself can participate in the production of expert-like knowledge; a
kind of authority that was once reserved only for the wealthy who could afford
both the leisure time and publication expenses.
One problem that could arise from
this transition is whether or not we now put too much stock into our own beliefs. Are we only replacing the external
Fountainhead with our own inner-truth based on our own limited experiences and observations? While I do not completely argue against the
value of lived-experiences as a resource for certain truths and values, it is
also important that we do not lose focus on the value of the expert
paradigm. An expert, after all, is
believed to be a person with a wide breadth of experience, knowledge, and
understanding about a certain issue or topic—something that goes deeper than
merely accumulating a list of facts about a topic.
Having ‘experts’ is important for
keeping arguments in check and building the structure upon which a particular
discourse rests. We learn from experts, but
not necessarily exactly whatever it is the expert is preaching, but rather, we
learn more about our own views and arguments.
This only works, however, when we accept a certain amount of authority
from those experts. If we do not do this
then we only reinforce the belief in our own views without having the ability
to critically evaluate them and without having the benefit of an expert with a
high degree of knowledge in a particular field to help us from falling into
obvious errors in our own solipsism.
In the end of the “Withered
paradigm” article, Walsh (2003) argues that the expert paradigm is in no threat
of radically disappearing. It is
undergoing changes, as it has been for hundreds of years, but it will still
remain. I think that this is evident
when one considers the goals of courses in information literacy on the
Internet. The idea of these courses is
to learn how again to recognize authority, this time on the Internet. In these courses, we re-learn how to look for
authority in the form of professionalism, references, well articulated
arguments, organization of the website, and both logical as well as grammatical
clarity. And, again, we learn to look
for the author and to do research into the expertise of the author.
If a new Oz were to catch on to
this trend in training in information literacy, such a great wizard would
likely take on the form of some great socially constructed website. A website that was easily available and
seemingly ubiquitous. One in which seemed to be the suggested search result for
just about every search engine query. It would be one so unassuming in
appearance as to visibly deflect authority back onto its reader.
Walsh, P. (2003). That withered paradigm: The Web, the
expert, and the information hegemony. In
Democracy
and New Media. Henry Jenkins & David Thorburn (Eds.). Cambridge,
Mass:
MIT Press. pp. 343 – 364.
Weinberger, D. (2007). Everything is miscellaneous: The
power of the new digital disorder. New York,
NY: Henry Holt and company. pp. 129
– 147.
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