Sam Vaknin : American Chronicle

The Demise of the Expert and the Ascendance of the Layman

"In the age of Web 2.0, authoritative expertise is slowly waning. The layman reasserts herself as a fount of collective mob "wisdom". Information - unsorted, raw, sometimes wrong - substitutes for structured, meaningful knowledge. Gatekeepers - intellectuals, academics, scientists, and editors, publishers, record companies, studios - are summarily and rudely dispensed with. Crowdsourcing (user-generated content, aggregated for commercial ends by online providers) replaces single authorship."

There are no solutions in Vaknin's analysis, but the diagnosis is pretty damned accurate. I suspect that those targetted are those least likely to accept it.

Should we merge this with the Global Warming thread? That's a prime example.

The core of the problem is the loss of credentialed identity. In the age of anonymous and pseudonymous authorship, the voice of the credentialed expert is drowned out.