Former American Library Association president Michael Gorman, who just two years ago dismissed blogs as a medium where “the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts,” used the Britannica house blog to disseminate his belief that if we don’t put some brakes on this Internet thing, we may never be able to learn anything from experts ever again. “The task before us is to extend into the digital world the virtues of authenticity, expertise, and scholarly apparatus that have evolved over the 500 years of print,” he writes, lest we fall prey to “an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise,” both of which he associates with the rise of Web 2.0 culture. Of course, given that he offers the Biblical inerrancy movement as a symptom of what the Internet hath wrought, the argument may have a few kinks in it, and the fact that he cites Andrew Keen approvingly also sets off a few alarm bells.
So what is it that allegedly keeps real experts from holding sway online? Basically, Gorman blames collectivist cyberutopians and anti-intellectuals. Also, he seems to think there are people out there who believe “scholarship based on individual expertise resulting in authoritative statements is somehow passé and that today’s younger people think and act differently and prefer collective to individual sources because of their immersion in a digital culture.” And here I thought I used Wikipedia more than Britannica.com because the one was free and the other kept all its goodies behind a subscription firewall. (Disclosure: The Britannica folks comped all us mediabistro.com bloggers accounts, but I still honestly don’t use it that much, mostly because Wikipedia has a richer pop culture knowledge pool, and that’s actually the sort of stuff I tend to look up.) Anyway, Gorman promises that sometime soon, he’s going to attack Wikipedia more directly, but for now he just wants you to know that “the intellectual life of our society must continue to be based on respect for expertise, the scientific method, evidence-based texts, and, above all, the value of the individual scholar, author, and creator of knowledge.” As opposed, no doubt, to some loser in Terre Haute who lives in his basement with 18 cats. Look, I’m all for experts, but I’m also the first person to tell anyone who asked that it wasn’t my master’s degree in film studies that qualifies me to write a book about 1970s Hollywood—and if people believe the dumb things they read online, maybe the solution isn’t to make it harder to publish dumb things, but to make sure kids grow up learning how to tell the difference between dumb things and smart things.