Pesce responds to Rushkoff

Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional?

"Destroy duality as you would destroy falsity" says the Taoist proverb.

Is there really any difference between the amateur and the professional? Only insofar as the professional has been able to string the velvet rope around his and his own (they've always been men), declaring this ground professional and that ground, well, something else altogether.

You can go to a professional doctor approved by the AMA. Or you can go to a 'quack' doctor. Like, say, Willem Reich. Who got into boatloads of trouble with the FDA for his 'quack' cures.

This, in all situations, is always about who is doing the authorizing. Who is letting whom into the clubhouse. An essential, shamanic act of 'blessing'.

This seems to be an essential, innate human/primate behavior. Wikipedia has managed to replicate, in its internal structure, precisely the same velvet rope of professionalism that is endemic to the pre-crowdsourced professions. Thus, crowdsourcing is completely beside the point. It does nothing to promote the amateur, necessarily, just as it does nothing to demote the professional, necessarily.

Yet that is only half of the story. What happens when the amateur and professional enter a networked continuum, a polity where some of the nodes are 'professional', while others remain 'amateur'? What distinguishes them? As knowledge and expertise move more freely throughout the network - surely that is the singular feature of the human network - the neat categories get worn away under the pressure from the network. Suddenly, professional and amateur labels matter a lot less than who knows what, and who can put that knowledge to work. This future - entirely utilitarian in this respect - does not invest itself in false distinctions. Only distinctions which can be supported a priori will be sustained by the network. And those distinctions will tend to subside through time, as knowledge and expertise distributes itself through the network.

How much longer are questions about 'amateurs' and 'professionals' meaningful? That's the real question here.

* * *

All of this either-or-ness. The truth is and-and-and. Yes, online activities promote participatory democracy and the development of new and/or accurate folksonomies, and they also lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions. It doesn't seem as though you can have one half of the equation without the other half. That which is empowering empowers both the positive and negative aspects of the ego. Some consideration should be made in design of the user experience to avoid circumstances which amplify the ego in less-than-helpful directions, but media always possess the 'Narcissus as Narcosis' quality that McLuhan pointed out in Understanding Media. Nothing is quite so tantalizing as our own image reflected back to us by the instrumentality of mediation. Our own words, unconsidered, illogical, contradictory, vain, mean and quite often intensionally hurtful are like pearls to us. This is almost corprophillia; if our shit stunk as we typed it onto the screen, perhaps we'd love it a little bit less. Perhaps.