[CAnet - news] The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority

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[Thanks to Richard Ackerman for this thought provoking pointer -- BSA]

http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/148/nicholson.html

The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority
Peter Nicholson
President, Council of Canadian Academics

Outline

    * The Decline of Deference
    * Role of the Media
    * The Dilemma of the Information Age
    * Massively Distributed Collaboration
    * Wikipedia, etc.
    * The Infosphere as Ecosystem

Today I will argue that what qualifies as intellectual authority in
contemporary societies - who and what to believe - is changing
fundamentally. I will speculate as to the reasons, and I will draw out some
of the implications for institutions of knowledge brokerage, among which
research libraries are of course prominent.

The thesis in a nutshell is this. People today are much less prepared to
defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data
and information - a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there's
a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is - Well, to ourselves
of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly
evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today
supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that - we can
only hope - will help us make sense of it all.

....

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