RU Sirius responds to Rushkoff

I was originally going to jokingly set the terms of this entire discussion as Glib v. Panicky, but I decided I probably wouldn't see either. Thanks to my old friend Kevin for proving me wrong.

The underlying spirit of this "folk culture" is one of playful participation. Economic desperation and excess disparity spoils the fun. I don't see how anybody in the current economic environment -- jobless recovery... jobless economy... can not want to talk about it.

I suppose I'm taking a very strong materialist view, but I suspect that personal economic concerns undergird the most panicky responses to the cultural impact of crowd/folk culture. We talk today about neo-luddites, but we tend to forget that the actual luddites were about one thing... the machines were taking the source of their livelihood. Now we have disintermediation and folk culture... undoubtedly leading to the devaluation of the profession or expert or special talent, but perhaps more importantly, we have an economic reversal that widens the circle of exclusion that danah boyd spoke about. Up until a couple of years ago, us techno-progressives could brag about an ever widening circle of inclusion. I think that some of us haven't caught up with how big and deep the trouble ahead is and how -- among other things -- it makes people reactive against those who delight in the cultural shifts wrought by technologies.

And then there's the glib part... "Proposition: expertise is dead and folk wisdom is all that we have." Well, expertise can't be dead... some people know more about a particular field than others ... it can only be ignored. One result of this would be that Joe the plumber's opinion on climate change is as good as any scientists etc. But even there, while the culture privileges folk wisdom, expertise (or talent) is still in the game. The problem, though... again, is money. To have an expert, talented class devoting their time and energy to honing a craft requires a healthy flow.

I may sound here like I'm joining the techno-reactionaries in their complaints about crowd culture, but I'm not. I'm a both/and not an either/or type. I think the only big problems we have are economic scarcity and the environment. The other stuff can work itself out.

Amy Bruckman said:

The one field where expertise is changing dramatically is journalism. And that's frankly scary to me. Bloggers fill some of the void, and in some cases may bring more expertise to the task than professional journalists. But we really do need people with the *time* and *mandate* to do solid investigative reporting, and no amount of tweeting from the scene can replace that. We need a new economic model to support professional journalism

a new economic model... if wealth, or it's representative, cash, was not scarce, we would have a new economic model fast. As is, not much good is going to happen...