I was having a discussion with someone today and the conversation came around to the topic of how bloggers are all "hacks". I asked why they were all hacks. This person said that it was because they had just read a few books and never been to university or didn't have a PhD. I asked why would that necessarily make them hacks. They said that it was because they never had their ideas criticized or put under scrutiny. I countered with the fact that universities themselves become insulated from critical scrutiny so therefore that argument doesn't hold. This person that I was talking to just held their ground on the whole university priesthood line basically. How do you get through to someone like that? Where does this thinking come from?
I agree with him in some areas. I see solid, historical research/writing in blogs as an exception, not a generality. Blogs these days are always about what people feel. No one cares how you feel. This is historical writing and it seems simple but in fact it is very complex:
Thesis
Supporting evidence
Supporting evidence is not "Oh I know a guy who said this about X" or "I think X is wrong and you should think its wrong too." Supporting evidence is actual research of primary sources. Very few bloggers are actually going to take the time to do that. It is very infuriating when people say "Oh the founding fathers said this" or "Obama is a Marxist." They just make blind assertions and the blogging community is so ubiquitous that you are never going to stop all the incorrect assertions. I do not think you need to have a PhD in a field to discuss the field, but you obviously have to know what you are talking about and given people' s lackluster time in public education where they are taught fairytales about the past and present can you really be resentful against someone who may be overly skeptical?
'Men do not change, they unmask themselves' - Germaine de Stael
Here's an excerpt from the (fictional) Manual of Censorship and Public Opinion Management:
- If you cannot directly prohibit the spread of ideas which are disruptive to the status quo, you can achieve the same effect by:
a) Subsidizing the production of media which counters ideas that are disruptive to the status quo
b) Encourage the "democratization of opinion", thus flooding the public square with useless opinions as if they were on a par with considered thought
Wikipedia, blogger, facebook... these are all vehicles for the democratization of opinion. I do not consider it a good sign that these venues are being touted by the Established media as heralds of a "new era" in public opinion, politics, news, etc. By encouraging nitwits to fill the Internet with terabytes of twaddle, the Establishment is effectively launching a "denial-of-service" attack against worthwhile, considered opinions. It bothers me that a handful of these big web companies provide so many free services that other providers can't figure out how to provide cheaply, let alone free. This suggests to me that there are hidden subsidies slushing around, unseen.
Clayton -
That's the point though, isn't it Cain? The Universities and public schools become insulated themselves so new voices outside of it are good and should be welcome. Obviously there are many bad bloggers, etc. The point is that you have to take each one on its merits and arguments. You can't just say oh well this person doesn't have a university education therefore their ideas are to be disregarded entirely. If you do that you implicitly believe in some kind of academic priesthood. Not only that, but you deny others the same kind of community feedback you believe is required to foster worthwhile scholarship.
"The Universities and public schools become insulated themselves so new voices outside of it are good and should be welcome. "
Well who are these new voices? I do not think that new voices are themselves good and welcome if the voice further confuses or misleads the field. Take for example Bill O'Reilly's new book on Lincoln, a best seller on Amazon and yet the book, which is historical in nature, does not cite any primary sources meaning that it is a book composed of nothing from the time period it is documenting. Now historians would call this a "synthesis work" which is ok...if you have been a historian for decades. Bill O'Reilly and his co-author (to my knowledge) are not historians. They have no historgraphical knowledge of the subject and they do not even bring forth text from the period to colobarate their thesis. That to me is an unwelcome source.
"You can't just say oh well this person doesn't have a university education therefore their ideas are to be disregarded entirely"
No but I would say "this person does not have an education on this matter so their ideas should be disregarded." Again, example: Centinel talks about an ancient society he has no idea about.
This suggests to me that there are hidden subsidies slushing around, unseen.
Really? You mean it can't just be the result of superior service offered because they dominate a significant amount of market share?
Take my local newspapers. All the writers on staff have an university degree in humanities (literature, social sciences etc), yet the average style of their pieces is not very far from that of a ten year old. I am not talking about the contents, but about how the articles are researched and, more importantly, written. Many bloggers write in better prose and carry out deeper research... and aren't paid a dime for their work.
And let's not forget the academic world is not an aseptic world where everything is scrutinized and criticized. Though I have a BA in Chemistry I have more than a passing interest in toher branches of science (mostly anthropology) and I can assure you under the patina of "peer review" and "impartiality" what gets funded, scrutinized and published is really subjected to human passion as much as everything else. Example? 34 years ago a graduate student found a mastodon bone with an arrowhead embedded in it in Oregon. Routine tests carried out suggested this arrowhead predated the arrival of the Clovis people (at the time assumed to be the first human dwellers of the Americas) by about a millenia. The graduate student duly wrote his paper about this find, hoping to attract attention and hence more funding to continue his work. Nobody took the time to criticize his piece: he was simply ignored because scientific fashion at the time dictated the Clovis people were here first. Fast forward thirty years and, in light of a number of findings in South America, pre-Clovis people are now accepted as a fact. New tests are carried out and the graduate student, now a retired professor, finally gets his prefessional vengeance. It's the same with modern day reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal Man): they aren't influenced by new findings and tecniques, but by social fashion, dictated the Neanderthal was a gentle, good looking creature exterminated by the evil H. sapiens.
That is easily countered. See this, it is a joint blog by a half a dozen professors of history specializing in Russia history. And lets not even go into how many people blogging at the Beacon, or LRC blog or blogs of any number of 'think-tanks' have PhDs.
@Schnapps: Yeah, I doubt that's what it is. There's nothing really that magical in what facebook does versus, say, MySpace whose market share has tanked. Google is offering every imaginable free service (even free DNS) and clearly has ties with US intelligence. YouTube is almost unchalleneged... seriously, what does YouTube do that nobody else can figure out how to do? Count me highly skeptical of these supposed "market winners" in the tech market.
I think one requirement for "market winner" should be that it is profitable. There is no indication that YouTube is profitable; it's being kept alive by the advertising firm (Google). Perhaps YouTube is a loss leader for Google.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
Actually, Clayton raises a good point about the hidden subsidies. I remember a while ago that the military advertised heavily on Facebook; I wonder how much they paid Facebook for the advertising. Military advertising would be a good vehicle for government subsidies to companies because the public doesn't really see the funds as subsidies like they would subsidies to education.
Also, let's not forget that the government funds a lot of stuff at universities that are often used by companies.
Take for example Bill O'Reilly's new book on Lincoln, a best seller on Amazon and yet the book, which is historical in nature, does not cite any primary sources meaning that it is a book composed of nothing from the time period it is documenting. Now historians would call this a "synthesis work" which is ok...if you have been a historian for decades.
Yes but Bill O'Reilly wrote a book not a blog post. If he had read four or five books on Lincoln and the Civil War in order to write a 500 word summary on what he had learned on the man from the books you would probably say that that O'Reilly dude takes his blogging very seriously.