Danah Boyd responds to all

First, my apologies for being MIA while at SXSW [South-by-SouthWest conference] . I'm painfully incapable of staying on top of email while at that conference. That said, I gave what I believe to be an interesting talk that might be of interest to many of y'all, focused on privacy & publicity, pushing against other binaries that keep emerging when we think of online practices. For those interested, I put the crib up here: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

Now, a few thoughts to the topic at hand...

Douglas Rushkoff wrote:

Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional? ... Do representative democracy, academic disciplines and other seemingly elitist artifacts fall by the wayside? Is the rise of the amateur simply the rise of the unpaid worker?

Although I'm with Mark on the importance of the Taoist idea of destroying duality, I totally disagree with the notion that the publicity and visibility of amateurs has eradicated the need for expertise or professionals of any kind. I think that this comes back to Clay's notion that abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. I think that we desperately need people who can really drill down deep in one area because we are not collectively able to do this. I think that what we're losing these days is not experts, but generalists, people who are deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of things. I can't help but be fascinated by the disappearance of classics education at the university of level. What body of knowledge do we collectively have? As a result, we tend to be more narrow and that means that we have experts.

Even at the local level, I think that we continue to turn to people who we individually crown the experts. I know who I turn to when I want new dubstep. And that's a different person than I turn to when I want a doctor recommendation. In both cases, I crown these people experts. That said, they are not professionals.

So that gets us to a different question... what does professional mean today? And what did it mean historically? Was Ben Franklin a professional? I don't think that I have a good handle on what that term even means, except for the ability to get paid. So let me ask a question... For the last decade, I wasn't paid to write but my writing led to countless paid work - consulting, speaking, etc. Does that make me a professional writer? How deeply connected does the money and work have to be?

I also have to ask... What are our investments in maintaining a specific professional cohort or class? Is this about a perpetuation of the 1950s ideal? Might it be better to ask what societal responsibilities and roles we want to make sure are covered and then ask how they can be funded? For example, I know that I want investigative journalism and I don't believe that either the market or bloggers are going to fill this role. I'm far more invested in finding a way for this role to be maintained than finding a way for newspapers to survive. Likewise, I want political representatives but I'm not convinced that the current model is working there either. Nor am I committed to professional politicians. Etc.

Connected to this, I don't believe that elitist artifacts are falling by the wayside. Quite the contrary - we're developing new types of elitist institutions, ones that are primarily privatized and not public. Power is now primarily in the hands of the private (business) elite rather than the public (academic, government) elite. Arguably, these elites are more powerful today than ever before. Private interests now control both academia and government in unprecedented ways, meaning that those private elites have a lot more say over what happens not just in their segment of society but in broader segments. I'm not sure this is a good thing but I'm pretty certain it's a new configuration. (I think it's also important to note that if we were writing this 150 years ago, we would've talked about the military elite... It's interesting to think that the elites probably ebb and flow.)

danah