Zeal For Truth

I’m not much of an historian, but I have lived long enough to know that the world has greatly changed just in my lifetime. I’m not talking about morals, or politics, or fashions—I’m talking about computers. More specifically, I’m talking about the internet. Even more specifically, I’m talking about how life has changed since we were granted access to the vast stores of information on the WWW.

I’m an Expert - How About You?
Before the internet we could learn from books or from experts. But now things are different when it comes to information—the internet provides us with information on every topic imaginable and everybody’s an expert. Or, at least we all think we are! The internet has given us lots of places to post our own knowledge, whether it is expert or not: blogs, forums, wikipedia, squidoo. There are also many concise summaries of knowledge that we can read to become instant experts on many topics.

But what has the internet done with the real experts? My guess is that it has hurt their pocketbooks as well as diminished their glory, because, in many cases, their expert knowledge can be found by simply using an internet search engine. For instance, you don’t need to join a terrorist organization to learn to build a bomb from an expert—you can just look on the internet (oh, wait, no you can’t).

Medical Experts
No where has the priesthood of knowledge been more soundly breached than in the medical field. There is a wealth of medical information available on the web (some exampes: WebMD, Yahoo Health, Medline Plus, Center for Disease Control). Sure, we still need doctors — it is probably not advisable to perform surgery on oneself, for instance — but how much better is it for our health that we can easily study our own symptoms and become informed and participative patients? I found this quote from Frank Gannon (a molecular biologist) quite telling:

It is true that any layperson can become completely conversant in a medical problem that affects his or her life. In this sense, the internet has democratized knowledge to the extent that today it is indeed inappropriate for scientists or physicians to regard themselves as the only custodians and sources of information.

Working With Real Experts
Do we still need experts? Sure. And we should even pay some of them for their expertise. But the fact that we all can be so much more knowledgeable about so many topics means that the experts have to be even more expert. That competition might be a good thing. As educated and internet-savvy consumers, we can put expert information to better use as we double check it with the multitude of freely-available sources.