David Weinberger gave a great talk to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Social Media Cluster today. David has great insight about the dynamics of social media. In his role as a scholar, he is free from having to worry about the commercial implications of these phenomena and to focus on the social dynamics they create. His views echo mine in many ways: human beings have lived for a million years in an environment in which information was scarce. Now we’re moving into an age of information abundance, and this will challenge our institutions fundamentally.

Many people, including David, refer to Wikipedia.org as an example of how much things have changed. Encyclopaedia Britannica used to market itself as the comprehensive source of human knowledge. Wikipedia makes no such claims, yet it is far more comprehensive and scalable than anything Britannica ever imagined. Yes, Wikipedia has its faults, but it is at least honest about its shortcomings, and this paradoxically makes it more credible. Ironically, the historical tendency of media and publishing institutions to build an aura of invulnerability around themselves has actually made them less accessible to the audiences. That makes their mistakes all the more glaring. Put another way, the degree to which you define yourself as infallible creates a disproportionately negative backlash when your fallibility is revealed.

This hasn’t ramifications for the future of our information institutions. In the past, people and institutions could define themselves as experts because no one could conveniently challenge their expertise. But we’re moving into a world in which expertise is constantly challenged. In fact, experts can maintain their status only by consistently discussing and defending their expertise. They can no longer claim to be the oracle of information on any topic because other people can access information on that same topic so easily. This means that the role of the expert evolves into more of in an aggregator, pulling together different opinions from different souces and drawing conclusions from them.

This is a dramatically different definition of expertise, and it will be uncomfortable for many people in business, politics and academia. But I agree with David that this is the way the world is going. In an atmosphere in which information is freely available to everyone, the expert can no longer claim to be the final word on anything. He or she must admit to fallibility and derive influence from the ability to assimilate many facts and arrive at the most informed conclusion