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If the continuing financial crisis has told us one thing, it’s that you can’t trust the experts. Everywhere you look supposed experts and authority figures seem to have been clueless; from the ratings agencies, to governments and senior officers and large financial corporations.

It appears the experts where on a “lunch break” when we needed them most.

Perhaps the world has gotten too complex for experts and they need to band together in complex neural nets to have a grasp of what’s happening.

In other areas, it also seems that experts aren’t all that they appear to be. In a new era of community participation, individuals can emerge as de-facto experts, providing them have the ‘chops” and are seen by the community to be making valid contributions.

The concept has considerable appeal because they appear to have the “secret sauce” of objectivity. Amazon is often sited as the best example of this community of experts, where reviews are given great currency and can be massively persuasive in generating sales. However, according to Slate, these critics appear to be suffering because they have stressful full-time jobs, they’ve become the people they were supposed to replace and their skills and objectivity have to be called into question.

"However, by refashioning Web 2.0 as a proprietary marketplace, Amazon's reviewer rankings subject enthusiasts like Grady Harp to the same pressures that confront the professionals they were supposed to replace. To keep writing, lest another reviewer usurp one's spot. To say something nice, in hopes that someone will say something nice about you. And to read for work, rather than for pleasure. "I have a tall stack of books staring at me," Harp wrote, in a wistful moment."

When it becomes a job, who are they working for?

In fact, the world of the customer review has become a business, you can by a “plug and play” system for your website or brand to help bring that supposedly valued objectivity.

Everywhere you look it appears the expert is in trouble, bothered by a world that’s now too complex for them to understand or in danger of loosing their objectivity because they are bowing to commercial pressures.

In an expertless world, who should we be listening to?



Posted by Ed Cotton