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. Here's Blair earlier this year:
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.