Let us, for just a moment, consider the internet minus the haze of social media. Does anyone else remember the days of using a set of encyclopedias to write a report on sea monkeys in sixth grade? How long did it take you to discover that sea monkeys are actually sea horses? Just to learn they aren’t sea horses at all, but instead brine shrimp? Only the “B” encyclopedia is the one your brother used to lodge his window open right before a huge storm blew over. Now it’s hash. And the local, small town library doesn’t have a single book to check out on the topic of brine shrimp.
Or how about the time everyone in the class had to select a president to write about. Since you were busy creating origami ninja stars during the critical moment of first selection, you end up with a choice between William Henry Harrison and Rutherford B. Hayes. You shrugged and thought to yourself, “Harrison Ford is Han Solo, so therefore Harrison should be more exciting than Hayes.” Later that afternoon, you remove the corresponding Encyclopedia Brittanica from the shelf to discover that William Henry Harrison survived the presidency for thirty-one days—enough time to do bubkis for you to write about in your report. His encyclopedia excerpt is a single paragraph. No way you’re gonna pad that out to 1,000 words!
Love or hate Wikipedia, the world of information has changed for the better over the last fifty years. (Brittanica has a website now! It’s actually pretty cool.) All of this readily available information has led to the emergence of a new breed of layperson expert on every imaginable topic. With a modicum of cognition and a mountain of motivation anyone can become a laser-focused expert in a moderate amount of time. From thermal dynamics to the Bolsheviks to connective tissue disorders to the philosophy of Homer Simpson, we can learn so much so fast.
The unseen victims of this information free-for-all have been the tediously and classically trained experts, who in exchange for their loyalty to the traditional academic pathways of yesteryear (you know, like the 1990’s), have been repeatedly poked in the brain pan with the phrase, “I googled it.” The only crime these crusty, old, white guys are guilty of is refusing to recognize that all the bits and bobs of privately guarded information they crammed into their brains over a span of decades are now widely available to everyone…and that technology has resulted in a large part of their education being a big, fat waste of time. The truth hurts.
That being said, these classically trained experts can and should still serve a valuable role in society…if only they could embrace the role of champion and maestro. Take family doctors, or primary care providers, as an example. Most doctors still house vastly more medical information in their craniums than do their patients. But, it turns out that many patients these days have the access and wherewithal to be highly specialized in their own private health and physical condition. In other words, it turns out that a sick person with motivation (to not die or live in constant agony) can become much more of an expert on their personal condition (via hundreds of hours of research and data collection) than any doctor could ever hope to be.
But I’m sure you see the problem here. Classically trained doctor person has spent years of arduous education becoming the expert of medicine. Meanwhile, chronically sick person has spent years of agonizing pain becoming an expert in their own skin. As they say, something’s gonna have to give. Only one expert can be right, right? Right?
With all these layperson experts running around willy-nilly exerting themselves and their self-taught expertise like some sort of new informational vanguard what are the old gatekeepers to do? I see it as a matter of fight or flow. One the one hand, they (we) can hunker down for a career of undermining the people they are intended to serve with their vaulted expertise…or perhaps these unfortunately-timed experts can accept the flow of reality and endeavor to provide leadership and guidance to the informational revolution within their individual fields of expertise. Just saying.
At the Desk This Week
The weather is changing here in Idaho. My grapevines are begging to run (so I gotta hurry up and finish pruning them). The grass is greening. Bulbs are blooming. Spring is here. All this to say, I haven’t spent that much time at my desk. I’m keeping things maintained inside and then running around in the yard like a drunk sprite (a fifty-year-old, limping drunk sprite).
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