The articles for this week were really interesting. Like some of my friends, I really had a hard time putting my post together. I really understand where Keen is coming from in his article, The Digital Emperor has no clothes about the elite, and getting the expertise of the professionals, but I have to say I do not agree with him. Well, I am not saying that the experts' opinions are not needed and required in some instances, but for me, it is different.
In my profession, I deal with evolving technologies almost on a daily basis, and with that comes the challenge of dealing with new problems that we have not encountered before, whether it is software or hardware related. A recent example was some problems my users were facing in scheduling and updating meeting invitations and calendar items on a Microsoft product. I contacted Microsoft and worked with them for almost 2 days on the issue with no luck.
Knowing that my users will keep on complaining until I find a resolution, I used Google, my best search friend, which came in handy. It's true the search was not very intuitive, and I had to really dig to find the answer, but hints to the answer were not provided by the experts. In my case it was provided by a user with a similar problem.
Now, I totally agree that we rely on experts, like doctors, accountants and tax consultants for a lot, but when it comes to informtion online, for me it does not matter who wrote it. I try to read and make sense out of it. A lot of what I read comes up as non-sense, so I end up just disregarding it, but when what I read is logical, I really enjoy reading it and use it no matter who wrote it. So I guess the internet is not making up dumper as Lessing claimed, on the contrary, I think it is mkaing us selective readers and giving us more things to consider and weigh on.
Check out this link, that claims Google is also making us stupid, and tell me what do you think? Do you agree? Do you rely on experts opionions for everything?
