The Rise of the Web based Auto Didact

There are 2 kinds of experts: the first is someone who conducts primary research and investigation or has specific experience in a particular area and the second is someone who has read and reviewed the primary materials and can claim expertise (by proxy) in that same area, or on a larger area based on the ability to synthesize expertise by ingesting the material from a selection of areas. Someone, for example, who reads and speaks a language is the first kind. Someone who studies the language from the outside is closer to the second kind – sort of an intellectual version of that first, and someone who learns about the language and its history, structure and relationship to others is definitely the second type.

In years past, experts of any stripe were few and far between. They earned interesting degrees after writing dense dissertations with complex thought in them. The rarified realm of academia was rich with those who knew stuff that no one could ever know without their say-so. Who, other than a native speaker could become expert in Swahili? Someone with the means to travel to where ever they speak Swahili or the time and resources to study the language. Experts need access to stuff the rest of us can’t get so that they can transmit their findings to the rest of us so we can rely on their expertise.

But times have changed. Those experts (types 1a and 2, I guess you could say) are no longer limited to the holders of advanced degrees or dabblers in the higher levels of studies. The internet has democratized expertise by making the heretofore esoterica which informs the intellectual available to the everyman. Now, the trends and connections which could only have been spotted by ivory tower denizens who can read the studies or access the stacks of data can be viewed and judged by anyone. Buzzfeed can show us about the racism in movies from the 70’s. The evolution of languages in the middle ages can be charted using webpages, and pdf’s of documents, primary and otherwise. I no longer have to wait for a specialist to sift through documents in the Vatican, or the results of medical testing in order to drawn and present conclusions.

If someone mentions something online with which I am unfamiliar I can look it up. In the olden days this meant looking it up in a dictionary or encyclopedia in the house. If you had the time and transportation, you could go to a library. If you were wealthy or well educated, you could have your own library. So only an elite class could become familiar with material outside of a relatively small niche. But now that I can get most everything on my phone while I stand in line at the bank, I can read not just the summary and notes version of a text, but the critical discussion. I can read the source material even though I haven’t invested in a compendium of documents or don’t have membership to an exclusive viewing library. The internet is the great intellectual equalizer. It isn’t that our experts are less intelligent, but that the public is more well informed. Sure, there will be a gap between what is available online and off, but that gap is shrinking constantly. Surely there will always be a space between the intellectual 1 percent who are gifted with brains to beat the band and who can make sense of what is out there, and the rest of the world, but that one percent gets bigger as people who otherwise might not have the opportunity to expose themselves to the material are suddenly allowed access to the same resources.

This is fantastic and dangerous. The Wikipedia syndrome which allows us all to pontificate and fabricate does create dangerous situations where our supposed expertise is based on unvetted material. But the plethora of primary (and verifiable) sources online through the digitalization of arcane texts and images, plus the access we have to people from around the world, all coupled with the ability to construct assessments, surveys and ascertainments by which we can construct new collections of fact make most anyone able to raise him or herself to the level of expert. I no longer have to rely on the set of scholars who have seen the Dead Sea Scrolls. I can see them without leaving my house. I can read the papers they have read. I can learn the languages they have studied. And while there is some groundwork that an established expert might have that I lack, I can cite all the same resources and can present my own opinions and findings as substantiated by a similar population of bibliographia.

In fact, whereas it used to be denigrating to call someone an “internet expert” as it indicated that the person was taking predigested summaries and glosses for true fact and presenting the self as an expert, as more and more becomes available to the “internetional” community, an internet expert has much the same authority and power as any other. In the same way that online learning and degrees have moved towards the level of respectability of the traditional model, internet expertise is fast approaching the acceptability of any other mode of authority.

The fact is, I enjoy engaging in on-line argument but not because anonymous pontificating is somehow a reflection of any true power – it is because the test of finding and assimilating relevant and on-point evidence is energizing. I can speak with clarity and authority on subjects about which I was not formally trained and, because my arguments are buttressed by the evidence from the “classical” experts, my statements have force. I am not asserting empty claims, or even saying things that “I heard once, somewhere.” I am giving my reasons and my evidence and my statement has to be taken as seriously as the claims made by traditional experts in their hundred-year-old books. It is simply the case that I have access to the same breadth of knowledge that they did and unless someone can show an error in my thinking, simply stating that someone else is an accepted expert is not persuasive. Do I run the error of hubris in my interpretation? No less than anyone else, from any time. Theses and dissertations are, no doubt rife with misdrawn conclusions or tailored statistics to support whatever finding the author needed to reach. This is not to say that there is some post-modern de-emphasis on an underlying truth, but that there is the same opportunity for people to find (or obfuscate) the truth as there was. Now I don’t need to be physically tied to a university library to do it when I can get all the same materials without putting on my pants.

In the Jewish world this has been both a blessing and a curse. We like to think that our sages of yore were writing more than just logical treatises on text – they were somehow inspired and reached a level of intellect which the commoner today cannot reach. But when it comes to creating new and exciting understandings of text, not ones which necessarily contradict, but innovations, we applaud that more and more people can read the texts and research the ideas. So while we can access a little knowledge and that is dangerous when we try to adjudicate comp[lex matters which require a human touch by someone specifically trained to weigh the various variables, when it comes to understanding ideas, we can certainly be more equipped than the masses of the past who could barely read, and had very little to practice with.

Technology has allowed more people to become celebrities because we can blast our image and message across significantly more channels that have substantially more reach than in years past. In the same way, we can read material from more sources and level the access playing field when it comes to studies, reports, papers, literature etc. so we can become relatively fluent in much more than we ever could. Experts are now all around us. We make ourselves into them and are no less able to hold intelligent conversations than they ever were.