Dictatorship of Idiots

Let's consider the “Dictatorship of expertise” vs. a “dictatorship of idiots” as referenced out of the book The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keene.

Keene, first of all, writes this statement in reply to, "these 'noble amateurs' would democratize ... the dictatorship of expertise" made by "a Friend of O'Reilly" in 2004. What they are talking about is the authorship crisis of present day. This is a cascade of events tumbling passed Web 2.0 aka sites such as Wikipedia. This also includes blogging in terms of being able to cut and paste anything you want off the web and call it your own.

As it seems, this friend of O'Reilly, seems to think that this is a, "...most 'awesomely' democratic consequence of the digital revolution". Keene seems to disagree.

So what am I, you, or anyone else thinking about this dictatorship of expertise vs the dictatorship of idiots? Well I think the dictatorship of expertise is as it reads, the books we learn from, the articles we read online, newspapers, etc. are/should be written by experts. Dictatorship only means that, before the web, this is all we had to go on when we went to the library, therefore there were only a select amount of "dictators". Since these experts always sounded much more intelligent than the average student, plagiarism was easy to spot and citations were necessary to make.

So with Keene's reply of the dictatorship of idiots, in relation to "noble amateurs", I take this as the average hobbyist taking over the spot of the experts. Today, any average person can write a whole freakin' book in their blog and 3\4 of it might be taken out of one (or many) other book(s). Keene mentions Wikipedia where a whole horde of authors constantly edit and re-edit these articles on basically everything the world has to offer, and they really don't even have to cite. Of course there are citations at the bottom, but how are we to know if that covers everything? Are they telling the truth? You can't even cite Wikipedia with an author because you have no idea who, or how many who's, are writing.

I think the whole reason Keene calls these people idiots is because we aren't getting any smarter by stealing other people's words. Our brains are not expanding with the beautiful self-inflicted practiced knowledge and writing style that only comes with truthful practice.

Keene says that basically the world is turning up-side-down as we speak; that we are reading and more constantly learning from these "noble amateurs" rather than the traditional experts which used to be the habit before Tim Berners-Lee (no! he is not excluded from Wikipedia) invented the web. Keene might even say that Berners-Lee was probably the last expert to ever live, because it all seems to go downhill from there.

The problem lies in the effortless way we can reach, copy and paste, and print online documents. This problem is obviously not making us any smarter, and as the rise of web sharing continues, the rise, rule, and "dictatorship of idiots" will continue, probably until the experts stop writing and the world starts recycling material (then we'll really be in trouble!).