In one of your recent emails, “Turning every Prius into a Hummer,” you speak of legislation that could allow congress to “double the amount of greenhouse gases in the US.” But where is the legislation citation? While I will grant that citing or quoting actual legislation may not inspire anyone, I think it is important for Moveon.org not to be viewed as a shrill liberal organization operating on people’s emotions and fears rather than the facts. To a certain extent, Moveon has certainly substantiated its claims as to how much damage liquid coal could do as a fuel source, but how can we, readers, be certain that the legislation is the problem?

Certainly one way to dissuade people of that Moveon is manipulating emotions is to consistently link to the actual legislation that is being debated. All current congressional legislation can be found at Thomas and I think a significant underpinning of Moveon.org’s credibility will stem from how much you trust your members’ judgment (hopefully more than the mainstream media and the government) by laying out the real facts in all of your communications.

And to my readers…

If you’re reading this and regularly get Moveon’s mail or sign their petitions, how about sending them a note like this one, letting them know that it’s important that they substantiate all their claims when asking people to participate in their actions? And if you’re not a member of Moveon, you should check them out. While I don’t agree with everything they send around, I do feel they’re an overall positive force in politics. They can help give you a platform to voice your concerns about government, and citizens voicing their concerns is always a good thing.

Mr. Reeves is right about the complexity of modern day issues like climate change and intellectual property but I would go further than he and include even seemingly “mundane” intellectual pursuits like economics and engineering. More and more, the day and age of the specialist is coming to a close. (I started writing about the death of the specialist a while ago–makes me realize I should get back to that one.) What we need are synthesists; scientists who have enough familiarity with numerous disciplines that they can navigate the corridors of the specialists’ libraries and knit together new areas of overlap.

Take economics, for instance. Several articles in prominent journals have now appeared discussing the importance of understanding human behavior in economics. I couldn’t agree more. But to do an exceptional study of such a topic would require at least a working familiarity with psychology and cognitive science. To understand the latest theories of evolutionary psychology, it would also help to be familiar with evolutionary biology. Tie this in with information in economics and its effects on markets and new disciplines dealing with how humans use information to make decisions and you are dealing with a lot of disciplines. This is why I say that if Mr. Reeves is right then we’ve got a problem.

I, however, think the computer and the Internet are essentially making polymaths of us all. And I mean that there’s more going on than that we can all do Google searches. The scientific process was once a matter collecting a lot of data from experiments and then writing up the theory. With computers collecting such immense amounts of data these days the scientific process is becoming more like coming up with a hypothesis and seeing if you can find the proof in a database somewhere. Astronomers have already had success with this model of science.

With data as a ubiquitous cataloged record of the world, I can only think that sceintists will be forced to reckon with multiple disciplines. And that process will be made simpler by the data sorting tools available to everyone like Google Scholar. Moreover, there is a movement afoot to get all of this academic writing and research out to the public. The more open the whole process, the better. I think age of the synthesist is upon us.

I also think that there will be plenty of room for measured debate thanks to the comptuer and the internet. Do you know what my mother said to me this morning? “Mainstream media is passé.” Seriously! She said that. And if she gets it, then we’re further along then I thought. I think everyone knows that the jig is up and that the mainstream media has no space for honest thoughtful discussion. The thoughtful discussion had moved to the internet and the internet is becoming the mainstream.

However in his 1964 book (prior to the mainstream spread of the Internet) he could not have been more prescient when he wrote, “there is a new electric technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet. Because of its action in extending our central nervous system, electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participatorial spoken word over the specialist written word.” This observation was somewhat premature. Although McLuhan discusses the extension of the tactile sense in his work he didn’t foresee our direct manipulation of information in the public forum of the Internet. I have argued before that interactivity can be considered the extension of the tactile sense into media. With this extension, the broadcast linear model of media is changing into a nonlinear exchange and it is this participatorial exchange that is challenging the role of the specialist. If the information is “out there” then specialist lose their monopoly on it and with their monopoly on information goes a great deal of their credibility.

The linear broadcast model lead to a fevered pitch of expert soundbytes sorely lacking in real debate or deep discussion. As Steven Johnson pointed out in his eloquent work “Emergence” the broadcast model originally based on a top-down specialist system of a hierarchy of editors and journalists began to undergo systemic changes when CNN arrived on the scene and made all of its news feeds available to local affiliates. Suddenly what had previously been a command control economy of information became a cacophony of stories dictated by ratings and not by news editors. This was the first step toward a more participatorial media and the first attack on the bastion of experts at the network news operations. Johnson also pointed out that this systemic change created a system based solely on positive feedback. To use his analogy a system based only on positive feedback is like an electric guitar leaning on an amplifier.

However, this attack on the specialist had little more effect than removing editorial control. The systemic change had not yet harmed the credibility of the news organization. Their credibility would come under scrutiny only with the development of a negative feedback system, a balance, as it were, and this balance (at least in part) has turned out to be the blog community. A single blog taken on its own is no threat to anyone’s credibility, but blogs, seen as a system for evaluation, do potentially represent a shift in credibility. The media can show a spectrum of opinions if it likes but it has very little capacity to synthesize information and let the most important facts bubble to the surface the way the blogosphere can because while the mainstream media may appear large there are actually fewer reporters in the field than there used to be.

While the expert may still yet reign in highly specialized fields like Physics, news and opinion and the deluge of information they represent are better processed by a group mind. For that matter, so is entertainment.

[coming soon in Part 2: The Entertainment inustry and Information as an Asymptote ]