Dan Knight posted an interesting
column last week that stemmed from a private debate he was having
with the Webmaster of another Mac site about credentials and
professionalism.
The other party in this debate had written:
Let's face, sites like LEM are out of their element on
the Web. . . . [site name removed], which is run by pros,
written by pros, has the best content bar none . . . I have
beem working 40 hours a week . . . building a truly
professional which is NOT a business.
We will see in year [reduced to six months in a later
email] who is left standing and who is viewed as a professional
. . . Let's face it, we have the best educated, most
professional writing staff on the Mac Web, we have more professors,
technicians and artists that anyone else, with more degrees than any
can shake a stick at - we are not hobbyists; we do not have kids
writing here, or nonprofessionals doing any of it, and give that I work
so hard on it it's hardly a spare time operation. I suggest you remove
that line. <snip>
Dan, a word of advice - please don't take yourself so
seriously. The Mac Web is . . . a place to exchange ideas and
information and build relationships in a civilized manner.
Dan answered:
I thought that's what we were doing with Low End Mac,
and it pains me to have another Mac webmaster call me ignorant, state
that I'm out of my element, and imply that Low End Mac's writers aren't
educated enough. The quarter-million readers who visit LEM must be
buffoons not to see it. His three emails on this subject make me want
to take a lot of cheap shots.
I don't know who the other person in that exchange was, or which
website he runs, but I don't blame Dan for being miffed at some of the
comments.
Some of us don't have the luxury of treating our Mac web endeavors
as a hobby. This is my day job. However, I also agree with Dan
that:
The best writers tend to be amateurs (by the original
definition of the word) - those who do something because they are
passionate about it. It's a great thing when someone can combine their
passion and their profession.
Quality and Credentials
I would go farther than that to declare that dedicated amateurs tend
to be better at most things than professionals.
I personally have what I consider to be a healthy skepticism about
credentials and professional gatekeeping as they pertain to fields such
as journalism. I'm sure that there are many fine writers who have
journalism degrees, and they probably learned a thing or two in
journalism school that will help them to achieve success in a
journalistic career, but my overriding contention is that if they
weren't already good writers when they entered journalism school, they
still won't be good writers after graduating from it. Writing talent is
something that can be honed and polished through the teaching of
technique, but the raw material has to be there in the first place, and
journalism school isn't the only place when can learn to be a skillful
journalist.
Like Dan Knight and a whole lot of eminent journalists outside the
computer orbit whose names you would recognize, I don't have any formal
journalistic training. However, the fact that I have made my living
writing professionally for the past 15 years and have been published
for fee in more than 50 newspapers, magazines, and websites, must
indicate that I'm tolerably good at it.
Over the years I have also encountered a dismaying number of folks
in this business who have journalism degrees but can't write worth a
damn.
Gatekeeping
Consequently, I get more than a bit in antsy when I hear advocacy -
veiled or explicit - for establishing requirements for journalistic
credentials before one should be permitted to pursue one's livelihood
as a journalist. This sort of gatekeeping is already creeping in at the
bureaucratic level. For example, under the North American Free Trade
Agreement, journalists are a category that can cross the NAFTA borders
to seek employment, but only if they possess a degree in journalism.
That would exclude some of the biggest established names in journalism
today.
So it bugs me when I hear aspersions being cast on "teenage high
school student writers." There are some pretty good journalists on the
Mac Web who fit into that category - Low End Mac's own Adam Robert Guha, Mac Militia's Joey Cooper,
and the Mac Night Owl's
Grayson Steinberg, to name a few. All of these young writers have
proven themselves capable of producing material that is readable and
interesting, which is more than I can say for some journalism degree
holders I can think of.
Control
What is the real rationale for setting up barriers to entry into the
journalistic game?
I can think of two: prestige and money.
If pursuit of professional journalism could somehow be restricted to
people who possess journalism degrees, and perhaps membership in a
professional society as well, the cachet associated with calling
oneself a journalist would rise several notches - at least
theoretically.
And if it were possible to keep all those pesky amateurs from
producing prose for formal publication, often for small or no
remuneration, the laws of supply and demand would seem to indicate that
the incomes of credentialed journalists would rise.
However, I don't think either will happen. At least I hope not - and
the Internet is one of the reasons why I doubt that it will. The
Internet is a great democratizer, and it is shaking up and threatening
all sorts of established hegemonies and professional cartels.
An extremely high-profile example of this is the phenomenon of music
file sharing. The music business cartel has discovered that it no
longer enjoys stranglehold control over the popular distribution of
music. And, of course, like any established interests whose dominance
is being threatened, big music is fighting back - and in ways that have
potential to diminish the utility and enjoyment of information
technology in ways that have nothing to do with music piracy. However,
I think that these reactionary forces will lose in the long run, and
that the entire concept of intellectual property will change
dramatically.
Another category that is being revolutionized by the Internet is the
heretofore tight control that the conventional medical establishment
has had over the dissemination of medical and clinical information.
More and more health care consumers are getting help and information
over the Internet and becoming less likely to accept the opinion of
their local MD unquestioningly. There is backlash here, too, with
caveats being thrown out that getting medical advice on the Internet is
dangerous. And so it could be if one fails to use discretion and common
sense, but with institutions like the Mayo Clinic posting information
on the Web, there's plenty of solid medical advice available as
well.
Another aspect of this is that the allopathic medical
model no longer has a junkie dealer franchise on clinical expertise.
All manner of alternative and complementary medical disciplines have
found the Internet to be a excellent conduit for articulating their
perspectives on health and healing to a wide market, and this delights
me as much as is scares some vested interests. I have been struggling
for many years with a number of chronic and debilitating health
problems, and I have found more helpful and effective information and
advice on and through the Internet over the past four years than I
derived through the conventional health care system over the two
decades prior to that.
The cool thing is that in the Internet age anyone
with a computer, some free software, and an Internet account can own
their very own "press" and address a vast potential audience, making
press freedom truly democratic for the first time in history.
And so it is with journalism. There's an old saying: "Freedom of the
press belongs to the man who owns one." The cool thing is that in the
Internet age anyone with a computer, some free software, and an
Internet account can own their very own "press" and address a vast
potential audience, making press freedom truly democratic for the first
time in history. Of course, that doesn't guarantee that these newly
emancipated publishers will produce anything worth reading, but the
marketplace should arbitrate their success or failure, not would-be
"professional" gatekeepers.
Of course, one must temper one's skepticism about credentialed
expertise with common sense. Do-it-yourself brain surgery is not on,
and the man who represents himself in court in most cases probably does
have a fool for a client, but there are many, many other areas where
abdication of personal judgment borders on the pathetic.
The Consensus of the Competent
About 25 years ago, the late historian Christopher Lasch wrote:
The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has
eroded everyday competence, in one area after another and has made the
individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other
bureaucracies. . .
Recent studies of professionalization show that
professionalism did not emerge, in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
in response to a clearly defined social need. Instead, the new
professions themselves invented many of the needs they claim to
satisfy. They played on public fears of disorder and disease, adopted a
deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular traditions of
self-help as backward and unscientific, and in this way created or
intensified (not without opposition) a demand for their own services.
. . .
The new paternalism has replaced personal dependence
not with bureaucratic rationality, but with a new form of bureaucratic
dependence. What appears to social scientists as a seamless web of
"independence" represents in fact dependence of the individual on the
organization, the citizen on the state, the worker on the manager, and
the parent on the "helping professions." The consensus of the competent
. . . came only by rendering the layman to incompetence.
The "claim that professionalism is based on
demonstrated intellectual merit alone" does not appreciate how easily
"intellectual merit" can be confused with the mere acquisition a
professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken
ideological consensus - how easily the indispensable ideal of
professional disinterestedness can be warped and distorted by the
social and political context in which it has grown up.
Freedom
The Internet is a powerful, democratic foil against that "consensus
of the competent" - the cult of expertism - and a means of restoring a
measure of the self-help, self-sufficiency ethic that prevailed before
the doctrine of professionalization and expertise was imposed at the
behest of vested interests.
I love freedom: free-speech, free expression, free press, free
marketplace of ideas. And that's what the Internet can and should be.
Freedom, of course, always comes at a price, and the price of freedom
on the Internet will always mean the necessity of tolerating the
dissemination of bad, stupid, or even highly offensive ideas, but I'm
much more comfortable with that than with gatekeepers arbitrarily
deciding what will or will not be heard - a motif that carried to its
logical conclusion ends up with the Taliban.
Let the free marketplace work. Let people exercise their common
sense and take responsibility for which ideas and methodologies they
will accept or reject, and which they will apply in their own
lives.
And let's deal the professional gatekeepers and credential elitists
out of the equation.
