Marcel Berlins criticizes Time magazine's decision to make web users "Person of the Year." And he misses the point by a thousand miles. He says:
The philosophy I object to, which the internet's information explosion has fostered, is that the "ordinary" person is as - no, even more - important to the dissemination of knowledge, information and opinion as the expert or the professional....Time's assertion that those working for nothing are "beating the pros at their own game" is nonsense. They are providing a different service, an opinion based not on expertise and experience, but on their less tutored feelings.
What this misses is that the "less tutored feelings" already dominate public life; has Berlins never seen the Sun or Daily Mail?
Worse still, " less tutored feelings" dominate expertise in Downing Street.
Political leaders have to back their instinct and lead (my emphasis).
This is no isolated example. Here he is in 1997:
There are times when to calculate the risks too greatly is to do nothing; there are times too when a political leader must follow his instinct.
And in a speech in Sedgefield in 2001 (no longer webbed), he said that in the 1980s:
I stopped thinking about politics on the basis of what I had read or learnt, and started to think on the basis of what I felt.
And, of course, there are Blair's many claims to be "passionate" about things.
We are, then, ruled by "untuored feelings" and emotivism. To blame the web for the rise of these and decline of expertise is not just wrong, but indicative of a bullying mentality - a sneering at the powerless accompanied by a reluctance to chastise the powerful.
Indeed, far from embodying raw emotion, the web can give a greater voice to the expert: there's more economic expertise in my sidebar than you'll find in Downing Street or the mainstream media.
What's more - and Berlins misses this too - in the diverse blogosphere there's a chance that individual errors will cancel out, thus giving us the wisdom of crowds. In the narrow hierarchical villages of Whitehall and the dead trees, there's no such hope.
So, Time was right. The web is a (small?) hope for escape from the barbarians who rule us.
I dare say that the readers of a blog as good as this have a great deal of expertise in different fields. Possibly we have more expertise amongst us than the massed ranks of, say, journalists at the Times. Obviously, we have more than the hundred-odd members of the government.
Posted by: dearieme | December 20, 2006 at 03:23 PM
So your argument is that because Blair is a knob, Berlins is wrong?
Posted by: james C | December 20, 2006 at 06:08 PM
It's right, Chris. There is more talent in your sidebar and the blogosphere allows it rein and we can then choose to either access it or not.
Posted by: james higham | December 20, 2006 at 07:28 PM
Blair is indeed a knob and in this case Berlins is also wrong. He is wrong because what is happening on the web is nothing new. A report by Demos about two years ago (http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/proameconomy/) pointed out the huge range of skills possessed by so-called 'ordinary' people. I wrote about it here (http://ibanda.blogs.com/panchromatica/2004/11/are_you_a_proam.html) which for some reason has started popping up in my referral logs.
Posted by: Ian Bertram | December 20, 2006 at 08:45 PM
You're definitely preaching to the choir now. George Will (famous U.S. pundit) went so far as to dismiss blogging as an "act of narcissism." Imagine, cretins thinking they actually have something worthwhile to say.
Posted by: John | December 20, 2006 at 09:24 PM
Berlins is right. There is a huge amount of absolute garbage in the blogosphere (I'm the proud owner of quite a bit of it) often made up, it seems, of somebody reading a BBC article and then writing a quick post before rushing off to work.
Of course, the strength of blogging is that although we're unhindered by inconveniences like facts (because nobody pays us, we're unaccountable), general accuracy, manners and so on we can offer a basic, politically incorrect opinion which, although not fitting in with the political orthodoxy of the day, does fit in with most normal people's view of things.
But it is a rare blogger who knows a subject well enough to really offer something new. Most blogging (yes I know there are execeptions) reacts to what journalists wrote first.
Posted by: Gary Monro | December 21, 2006 at 12:47 AM
dearieme
some of us *are* journalists at the Times...
Posted by: Gabriel | December 21, 2006 at 12:57 AM
But if you are a journalist, Gabriel, I have to doubt the accuracy of your remark.
Posted by: dearieme | December 21, 2006 at 05:22 AM
Bollocks. Rather than the stenographer corps, in the blogosphere you can get your astrophysics news from an astrophysicist and your military news from Col. Lang.
If you haven't read any blogs other than Instawanker, Harry's Place and Belle, though, you are unlikely to be aware of this.
Posted by: Alex | December 21, 2006 at 10:49 AM
I particularly liked his comment:
"I am not saying that the amateur's view is less legitimate than the professional's"
when that is in fact exactly what he spent the entire article saying. It's all a bit "I'm not racist but...".
Posted by: Katherine | December 21, 2006 at 03:00 PM
Journalists are amateurs at everything!
Posted by: AntiCitizenOne | December 21, 2006 at 04:48 PM
Shocks me but I have to agree with Alex here - go to his blog if you want some detailed info on how it is. That's the blogosphere as it should work.
I disagree with this comment above: "Of course, the strength of blogging is that although we're unhindered by inconveniences like facts..."
These bloggers abound, yes, but they don't last. There's definitely a process where the informed succeed in the end.
Posted by: james higham | December 21, 2006 at 07:56 PM
Oh, I don't know about that, James.
But I do agree that there's a terrific de-haut-en-bas quality about a lot of these journalistic offerings about blogging - talk among yourselves if you must, they cry, but if you want *informed* comment, you must always come back to the experts.
As Yasmin A-B put it, "Mass blogging may indeed be giving access to Everyman, but is he always worth listening to?". Of course not, Yazz; but then, if we're being honest, are you?
Posted by: Mr Eugenides | December 21, 2006 at 10:16 PM
Any man who wishes to think better of his wife should listen occassionally to Ms Alibi-Braun.
Posted by: dearieme | December 22, 2006 at 11:24 AM
You've put your finger on the main difference between Blair and Brown. Blair is an instinct-based, gut politician. Brown is cerebral - he calculates and weighs and comes up with decisions on a rational basis. The difference in style of decision-making alone is going to produce a very different sort of Labour government when Gordon brown takes over, IMO.
Posted by: snowflake5 | December 29, 2006 at 03:45 PM
Gary Monro,
That's the whole point. Bloggers link to establishment journalists and cite the information they provide. But they go a step further: they *use* the bits and pieces provided by the establishment journalists; they subject the public statements of government and corporate figures to critical analysis in terms of the information that's freely available out there. In other words, they aggregate the available information and draw conclusions.
And the real issue isn't the level of expertise of the individual blogger versus that of the "professional." It's the fact that in a network, distributed intelligence can be brought to bear. Truth emerges through an ongoing dialectic, or adversarial process. Ever hear of the Delphi process? It's been embodied in the Web. That's a huge improvement on the old world of one-way conversations.
Posted by: Kevin Carson | January 08, 2007 at 08:09 AM