Who’s a Pseudo Expert?
September 11th, 2003Today’s Washington Post includes in the business section this article on blogs.
This bit didn’t impress me:
Blogs (short for “Web logs”) sometimes take the shape of online diaries for the lonely hearts set or digital soliloquies for those who seek an audience for their sometimes-hourly musings. They’ve also acted as a sounding board for would-be political pundits and pseudo-experts on any given topic.
All that’s true enough, but vastly incomplete. Of course the blogsphere includes adolescent journals, the obsessive typing of solipsistic adults and many people spouting off about topics about which they have more opinion than information. But deriving a characterization from this parade of examples is like looking at some of the stuff published on paper and saying paper is a medium for uninformed or uninteresting rants.
The “sometimes” modifier saves the passage in some strict grammatical sense from being a general characterization of blogs, but the clear intent was to set up this image of blogging as the domain of various inconsequential types in contrast to the trend of blogs “going corporate,” the topic of the article. But long before “suits” in corporate PR or marketing departments discovered blogging, the medium was embraced by many authentic experts.
I’d like to think my blog is more than “the sounding board of a pseudo expert” with regard to PRC securities regulation. Indeed, in my experience many journalists writing in this area are at best pseudo experts–they often are astoundingly uninformed.
More generally, securities regulation is covered by authentic experts blogging at The Securities Law Beacon, The 10B-5 Daily or the Corp Law Blog. Lawrence Lessig is no pseudo-expert. These are of course only a few of many possible examples.
Perhaps the real story is not that serious people are now discovering blogging but that blogging poses a serious threat to the monopolization of media by pseudo experts working for traditional publishers.