On Trust
Emi asked, “Do you think that new media will tend to undermine universities and scholars as arbiters of what kinds of information and knowledge are authoritative?”
No. The most valuable service that academia provides is the imprimatur of expertise. When you graduate with a degree from say, GWU, your potential employers can trust that you know something about political management because they trust GWU to only give degrees to capable people. That is, rather than quizzing each job applicant about political management, employers trust academia to do a good deal of that screening for them. (This is closely related to the idea of “market signaling”, for which Michael Spence won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. See his book Market Signaling: Informational Transfer in Hiring and Related Screening Processes. In short, the value of your degree indicating to employers that you're capable is greater than the value of any skills you learned in class that may apply to your job.)
This academic imprimatur is the reason you can read an article in an academic journal and believe what you’re reading. You don’t have to collect the data and run the analysis yourself because the journal staked their reputation on it. And the university that employs the author staked their reputation on it. Because you trust the journal and the university, you can trust the author. Likewise in journalism, I don’t have to interview politicians, file FOIA requests, and employ fact-checkers because I trust papers of record (NY Times, WaPo, etc.) to do it for me. Because I (more or less) trust them, I can (more or less) trust what I read.
(By the way, this issue of trust is why academic and journalistic institutions basically have to flip out over plagiarism: their reputation is their lifeblood.)
Many people fear new media because they tend to disintermediate people (‘to disintermediate' isn’t actually a word, but it totally should be. It means ‘to cut out the middleman’). For example, computer word processing disintermediates secretaries, and Amazon.com disintermediates brick and mortar shops. While this sucks for the middleman, there’s a net gain in social wealth.
As new media give people access to unprecedented amounts of information, academia’s job of mediating that information, organizing it in useful ways, and stamping it as authoritative, is more important than ever. What good is more information if there’s no way for consumers to filter out contradictory data and find valid analysis? Currently, and for the foreseeable future, academics are the best people for the job. And indeed, they’ve staked their jobs on doing it well.
No. The most valuable service that academia provides is the imprimatur of expertise. When you graduate with a degree from say, GWU, your potential employers can trust that you know something about political management because they trust GWU to only give degrees to capable people. That is, rather than quizzing each job applicant about political management, employers trust academia to do a good deal of that screening for them. (This is closely related to the idea of “market signaling”, for which Michael Spence won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. See his book Market Signaling: Informational Transfer in Hiring and Related Screening Processes. In short, the value of your degree indicating to employers that you're capable is greater than the value of any skills you learned in class that may apply to your job.)
This academic imprimatur is the reason you can read an article in an academic journal and believe what you’re reading. You don’t have to collect the data and run the analysis yourself because the journal staked their reputation on it. And the university that employs the author staked their reputation on it. Because you trust the journal and the university, you can trust the author. Likewise in journalism, I don’t have to interview politicians, file FOIA requests, and employ fact-checkers because I trust papers of record (NY Times, WaPo, etc.) to do it for me. Because I (more or less) trust them, I can (more or less) trust what I read.
(By the way, this issue of trust is why academic and journalistic institutions basically have to flip out over plagiarism: their reputation is their lifeblood.)
Many people fear new media because they tend to disintermediate people (‘to disintermediate' isn’t actually a word, but it totally should be. It means ‘to cut out the middleman’). For example, computer word processing disintermediates secretaries, and Amazon.com disintermediates brick and mortar shops. While this sucks for the middleman, there’s a net gain in social wealth.
As new media give people access to unprecedented amounts of information, academia’s job of mediating that information, organizing it in useful ways, and stamping it as authoritative, is more important than ever. What good is more information if there’s no way for consumers to filter out contradictory data and find valid analysis? Currently, and for the foreseeable future, academics are the best people for the job. And indeed, they’ve staked their jobs on doing it well.
posted by Aaron Suggs at 4:10 PM
1 Comments:
I agree. It is increasingly necessary to self-police the information one uses (and trusts). Way too much information to navigate through for any one entity to be the watchdog for everything.
One of the cooler aspects of the information age is that everybody can (and does) police everybody else.
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