It is an undeniable fact that knowledge is powerful … that to know is to be empowered, to be enlightened and that until recently access to knowledge has been limited and controlled. There were certain channels through which knowledge was acquired and it was not directly available to everybody. Knowledge was in the custody of a few: the experts.
- Some say people didn’t need the experts, because they had knowledge in themselves, but … this is knowledge too. You need to know that you know what you need to know. Then you need to know how to access that knowledge. Having gold in the backyard will not make you rich. First you need to know this. Then you need to know how to get to it.
This has led in time to the creation of a concept which would give expression to this paradigm: AUTHORITY. Authority embodies the source and validation of knowledge. To this day there is a residue of this in questions like, “What authority are you relying on?”
Knowledge is like a coin. On one side you have distribution and on the other you have literacy (I exclude oral traditions here). Now it’s important to note that literacy depends on distribution. Literacy is knowledge (we call it education). In order to know to read and write someone has to share this knowledge with you. Because knowledge empowers people, the distribution of knowledge (education) was limited to just a few (the elite), usually the wealthy or those in positions of power. The first step toward breaking this tyranny was the invention of the printing press, of which Gutenberg press was the most influential. It would take another 500 years till the full benefit of this would be materialized through the industrial revolution of the 19th century when “paper and books became financially affordable to all classes of industrialized society”. The second step was the wide spread effort to teach everybody to read and write. So literacy was no longer the privilege of just a few, but of the majority of the population.
Google represents the third step in the process of knowledge distribution, effectively ending the tyranny of the expert. Although until Google, pretty much all knowledge has been captured into books (a great and successful effort), full access to all these books continued to be limited to just a few (usually the scholars), which perpetuated the old aged limited access to knowledge.
With Google we have the beginning of a new era: information age. Google stated mission is: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Although their mission is not complete, the impact of their efforts is already profoundly felt in the super ease of access to knowledge for everyone who’s minimally literate.
Next Monday will explore the implications of this in the demise of the expert.
Till then, I want to hear from you.
How did Google change the expert paradigm?
Is there a role for the expert left in the information age?
Florin, great reflections on theology in/for a Google-shaped world. The change in authority relations is huge, encompassing not only pastors and churches, but denominations, professors, Christian presses, Christian organizations, and famous Christian speakers. Above all, those of us who are naturally at home in the historical Christian faith don’t know how to talk or think about Christianity in a context where our discussion partners don’t even have a category for “the authority of Scripture.” Do we hit them over the head with it, or do we find other ways to talk about Scripture? Is it enough that it is the closest set of reports we have on the life and teachings of Jesus, Paul, and the early church?
– Philip
Philip, it is indeed a great change, yet … the greater and deeper the change, the more excited it feels. This is only the dawn of an amazing era. It is true that there are a lot of skills we need to learn if we are to stay afloat and navigate the seas ahead. Let the adventure begin!!!
Florin,
Great post again.
BTW: Philip is putting on a great conference of the same name on March 10-12. http://transformingtheology.org/calendar/theology-after-google – I will be helping out as well. We hope to webcast it and I would love to have your input…
Thanks for the email about this post and I hope we can continue to find ways of working together,
Spencer
It’s interesting that it is the “tyranny of the expert” that is ended. Doesn’t this betray a bias? Granted, there are people who have misused all sorts of power – including the power of information. However, that is not the only sort of power that has been abused. This is a part of the fallen human experience. There are times when it is a very good thing to have an expert. Brain surgery, for example. And web md is not a substitute for a brain surgeon. Furthermore, with this change in the distribution of information, there is a great deal of misinformation which people who have no training or ability to discern their way through may take as accurate. This would be the ‘tragedy of no expert,’ I guess. Just an observation that the accumulation of knowledge by an expert, and even “authority” need not always be negative.
Have you read “The Starfish and the Spider,” by the way? Pretty good book about the very things you bring up.
I am not talking about the death of the expert per se, but of a kind of expert, hence the “tyranny”. I’ll expound more in the following posts. Stay tuned. BTW, good push back, Andy.
good point. keep going!Google means freedom!
in the seventies I found out about a Japanese project called the computerised village, where everything was controlled by computers and available to all the people. it came out that information reproduces itself and does not lose value. and so on. it was the best idea I’ heard for years. experts will continue to exist and therefore will be highly qualified and well paid. people “doing” things well will value a lot compared to people knowing about hot to do things.
Alex, you point well to the preeminence of the “doing” experts over the “knowing” ones. Thank you for the nudge to keep going!
Excellent, thank you!
Good questions.
Let me start my answer with a question. Did the “birth” of enormous information found on books only in the last 30 years, increased by only half of the proportional qty, the number of experts? The clear answer is NO.
Indeed, assembling all the info found on Google could serve you at the beginning as a solid base for your expert status, but on the long run your audience will realize that something is missing. That something are the inner values, built NOT on a Google search and assemble routine, but built on other routines which will be the same in any age of information we will go through. This also answers a very frustrating question I found myself asking everyday: in such an era of availability of info why we are so mediocre? A very simple answer: because very few of us know or take the challenge to process all the info in the best possible way for us.
I cannot help myself not finish with this (taken from somebody else): in life is good to know what you know, but it is also very important to know what you do not know.
The genuine Expert will always be aware of what he does not know, the Google doped Expert will think he knows everything.
A group of philosophers and cognitive scientists have coined the term ‘age of the informavore’, which I find very descriptive for this new era.(The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food. )
One guy, Frank Schirrmacher, says that as the internet expands, we have an explosion of ideas and not enough brains to cover them. As information is fed by attention – and this is limited, the ideas themselves are subject to Darwinian selection: people decide constantly what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is weak, which is stronger, what to search, what to leave aside.
Speaking about theology, I personally think that the question is not so much about authority or ‘expert’ voices vs public at large, but about voices that make sense to people while they are busy with the ups and downs of their daily lives. ‘Authorities’ keep their status as such by offering people a sense of direction, or meaning, or hope (strong, viable ideas in the above terms) rather than insisting on privileged status and proclaiming messages people are not interested to hear.
Well what about information overload? What about “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”? The age of the experts is not over yet, and I don’t see it coming soon either! Information is powerful but in the hands of those who lack skills to process it could become dangerous!
My only hesitation is that it gives Google a bit too much credit. It almost sounds as if they invented the internet. Is Al Gore on the board with this?
I think you could make the same claims after the printing press, large scale implementation of public education, television, the Internet, etc. The point is that we keep creating better ways to disseminate information, educate the masses, and facilitate diverse communication.
Mike, feel free to hold back on crediting Google for too much or everything. Of course it would be naive to put it all on Google. Google has however done something unique that made really possible the widespread of information, the internet as we know it today. On top of this, it was Google who started the daunting project of digitizing every single book in this world, making them available at the click of the mouse. Sure it will take a bit longer till this will truly come to fruition (not so much on Google side, but the other parties and structures involved), but the ball is rolling.
Sure, the printing press was a huge step forward, but Google took it both a step further and changed the game in subtle, yet profound ways. So it is appropriate to speak of a Google era.
I love Google products and use them every day (I love the android OS on my phone!!).
We should look at what really makes Google tick. Mainly, Google did a better job of monetizing searches and commercializing information that the rest of us created. Most of the technology was already done for them, and ALL of the content was done for them. They succeeded by making internet traffic and search ranking a commodity to be bought and sold. This was much like what financial instruments has done for energy, soybeans, pork bellies, etc.
To truly talk about theology after Google, we need to not only discuss wider access to information, we need to discuss what it means to be able to buy a position of authority. We need to realize that the most profitable company in America is simply a broker of a this new commodity – our attention. That’s always been a possibility, but never like this. Google’s slogan may be…
“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
However, that isn’t really what they’ve done. What they’ve really done is to allow money to replace the old systems for assuming the role of authority (replacing science, universities, churches, government, and other modern institutions). I’m not saying it is any worse or that money wasn’t always a factor (how much money does the Catholic church have?). Since Google changed the way you get to the top of the search ranking and buy access to internet traffic, it did exactly what our big institutions like churches and governments had previously done. It sold authority, paying for being the #1 result, therefore, paying to be the “leading authority” on a subject.
The result is that we have a greater illusion of what is informing us. The line between advertising and expertise has been blurred even more.