How many social media experts do you have to put into a naked body pile to get a heap?
On the same principle as Extreme Philosophy or whatever I end up calling my academic cult, I ran across this: Social Media Epistemology. I put up my take on the same topic - Disagreement is good unless you want to go pro in social media - but I’m rather more cynical (suprise, suprise) and think that charlatanism is rife. Part of the problem is the idea with the linked post is the idea that you need some kind of complete knowledge of the situation in order to declare yourself a social media expert, and thus because it’s almost totally impossible to have complete knowledge, then this somehow invalidates any complaints about the dubiousness of declaring oneself a social media expert.
This is a bad bit of reasoning. Let me illustrate how. A quick search on Google informs me that there are three football players in the English Premier League who have scored eleven goals this season - Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney, Chelsea’s Didier Drogba and Tottenham Hotspurs’ Jermain Defoe. On the other hand, I, Tom Morris, have scored precisely zero goals in any football match ever. But since there is no way you can score an absolute, top, hundred-percent number of goals, then Messrs Rooney, Drogba and Defoe are just as talented a striker as I am. No, that logic doesn’t really work. Just because there is no absolute perfection doesn’t mean that some people aren’t better than others. Rooney et al. are better at football than I am. If I were to start calling myself a football player worthy of a place on a Premier League side, you would have very good reason to laugh at me.
What we have here is a Sorites paradox: just because we cannot draw a clear boundary line and say that some group have the expertise to be on one side of it and others do not does not mean that we cannot make clear judgments. With questions related to what we mean when we say someone is an expert on something, there are two actual problems here: one is whether or not you believe experts exist, and one is whether or not you have a good way of sorting them. Obviously, if you don’t believe experts exist, the second problem doesn’t arise.
When a horribly cynical and negative person like myself mocks ‘social media experts’, I’m not saying that there are no experts on the thing everyone calls social media. There most definitely are experts on the technology, on the social or business use of those technologies, on the relationship with marketing, and so on. Part of what I am saying is that there is such a difficulty sorting the wheat from the chaff: since anyone can come along and say “I’m a social media expert”, it’s difficult to be able to sort out which ones have actually spent their time understanding the complex and rich dynamics of online communities, and those which are basically MLM/MMF-esque scamsters who have added ‘social media’ to their list of tricks. It’s a bad situation as there actually are people I know and admire who work on online projects in a social media role. I’ve got no objection to them using their talents to make money and help people. The ones who know what they are talking about are the victims of the douchebags. What I’m saying is that if you actually want a social media expert, you may be better looking for someone who doesn’t call themself a social media expert.
This is one of the important points about expertise: it often comes unexpectedly. The reason why businesses hire graduates isn’t because they have a dramatic shortage of historians or mathematicians - it’s because they are supposed to be able to think better. Same goes in programming: that’s the point Paul Graham was making in Great Hackers when he said the programmers you hire to work on a Java project won’t be as good as the ones you hire to work on a Python project. Just like with nature, we would much rather make a few false negatives in deciding on which people are experts than make a false positive and let some lunatic convince you he’s really a master surgeon and you end up in a coffin. We have complex degrees: to call yourself a doctor, you need to get a degree from a recognized medical school. Same for lawyers, accountants and so on. To inflict your views on university students, you generally need to spend a few years doing a Ph.D. And we generally make it illegal, immoral or subject to certain punishments if you pretend to qualifications you don’t have either in the professions or in the academy.
What, though, is the actual problem? Simple: this grossly unqualified class of consultants are pushing ideas that are sometimes totally inappropriate. We’ve seen it with technology in school - instead of liberating students by teaching them how to code, we’ve just used computers as a way to replace teachers. CD-ROM and now Internet curricula have become prevalent, and the qualifications these lead have subjected the more rigourous academic qualifications to the effect described by Gresham’s Law.
Anyway, social media epistemology: I thought that was definitely worth sharing. Now I should go and do some real work.
