Whom do we trust?

We trust a) those who we know to have provided us with valuable, accurate and reliable information in the past and b) those who we know (many) others to place trust in.

Ergo, information without social context (because trust is a part of the larger social context) is a useless. How do I know that someone is a “trained professional”? Because some authority that I believe to be trustworthy told me so and because he has proven his expertise to me in the past. Now, why do I read JP Rangaswami’s blog and not that of some random MySpacer? Because I know that he’s an innovate thinker and experienced information technologist. Because other people whose writing I like link to him. And, most importantly, because I deduct from the fact that I found his past blogs interesting that his future blogs will be relevant as well.

I think this transcends the debate about “web vs. library” and “experts vs. amateurs”. The expertise of the lone librarian who is incredibly knowledgeable is invisible to me unless I’ve met him in person, unless the building he works in is around the corner or at least in the same city, unless I have proof (!) that my trust in him is well placed.

What it boils down to is trusting institutions vs. trusting individuals. The New York Times has managed to grow to be a trusted institution over a long period of time, in a forest with just a few tall trees – the old media ecology. Now we’re suddenly in the middle of the jungle (sorry for the silly metaphor), where it’s much more difficult for such an institution to grow slowly over many generations, because on the web institutions are no longer causally local, no longer closer or further away from me. To take this one step further: institutions are already virtual in that they aren’t people – on-line they are doubly virtual because they also lack an individual identity.

But trusting people still works. We do what we’ve always done – building social networks – and we do it because we believe that those in our network can provide the most reliable advice. The problem with the web in its primitive current stage is simply that there is an ocean of anonymous voices that posses no authority precisely because they’re anonymous.

Lastly, before you accuse me of propagating some sort of “information mob rule”: my point is not that information and knowledge are relative and debatable, or that whatever trusted person X says is always right. My point is that we face the exact same problems on the web and with user-created content that we face in the real world whenever we look for information – whom do we trust? The answer can only be that we trust those that we know, be it in person (which is always preferable) or only virtually.

As an aside, maybe this concept should apply within applications whereby never used features could dissolve to on-demand plugins, as direct feedback to the community that created it.

http://answers.yahoo.com/

The problem is that it dodges that critical adjective you use, “qualified.” The result is that it is just another social space where the environment has a different structure. (Also, I think it is hobbled by the fact that you are limited to 110 characters for your question!)

This moves me into JP’s domain. Most important is that I am not sure what JP was trying to say about training and education. Here in the United States, you need both education AND training to be a librarian (and, for that matter, to be any form of journalist). This is how you get the right balance of theory and practice.

My other point is that you do not deal with complexity by either finessing it or ignoring it. There is a lot of wisdom behind recognizing that a question may NOT have a simple answer. (As H. L. Mencken said, “For every complex question, there is a simple answer … and it is WRONG!”) Expertise is not about secret signs; it is about being adequately credentialed to speak with authority in a given domain of discourse. If you seriously believe that markets are conversations, then I would think you also need to respect the value of authoritativeness in the texts of those conversations!

JP Rangaswami, author of the routinely insightful Confused of Calcutta blog, had an interesting post yesterday in which he considered the role of the ‘livebrarian’. JP is not a librarian. He’s formerly CIO and now ‘Chief of Alternative Market…

The livebrarian you identify is an individual requiring a fluid intelligence (derived from a variety of sources) which, in reality, is possessed by very few people.

My problem is I really think that any damned fool can be a librarian. Trained people tend to have the anchors and frames that the trainers put in. Training is good. Education is better.

And if we are talking semantics about training and education, I would use the traditional example of sex training versus sex education.

I think we need to be careful.

Maybe that’s just me.

I fully take on the points about the social engagement and general social aspects of it. Markets are conversations.

I have met quite a few excellent librarians and booksellers whose education is real life and whose training is passion.

We need to be careful. No holy of holies please.