EVERYONE'S AN EXPERT

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 230 06/09/2013

Richard Dawkins' meme theory has always interested me as a metaphor, though I only partly accept it. Ideas do propagate from mind to mind and certainly they can mutate during that passage, certainly some do survive while others perish. It's the nature of the selection process I'm not sure about. Simple ideas like "the world is round" can be related directly to physical reality but big ideas like "Christianity" or "Islam" can't, and what's more they're too big, various and vaguely defined to even be treated as coherent entities. (Even so, the horrible fate of his concept - appropriated by giggling netizens to describe pictures of talking cats - seems a bit harsh). 

There is however a class of very simple meme that fascinates me and that is the cliche or verbal tic: a phrase like "back in the day" that appears from nowhere and enters ubiquitous usage for a few years before fading away again. It seems to me that such phrases can be analysed to reveal useful truths about peoples' attitudes to the world. My current favourite tic is "it's not  perfect". If I had a quid for every time I've read this phrase in reviews and online comments over the last two years, I'd perhaps have the deposit on a small hybrid automobile.

What does "it's not perfect" tell us about the way people are thinking? Two things really. Firstly they may believe that perfection exists and is worth seeking out (which is most likely untrue). Secondly, and far more importantly, that they not only know the object under review has flaws, but they're desperate to let everyone *know* that they know. That's because they will be judged and mercilessly ridiculed if they fail to mention a single flaw. They may be accused of being naive, sloppy, biassed, even a "fanboi" or a "shill", by the online masses, who are all experts and feel they could have written the review better themselves.   

I'm not just talking about reviews of consumer electronic items here. One of my more pathetic weaknesses is inhabiting the Comment Is Free forums on the Guardian website, mostly those on political topics (where I pick my way gingerly through the ferocious troll fights) but also those on science. For example the other day the paper carried an account of new research on a possible connection between the increasing incidence of Alzeimer's Disease and improved public hygiene (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/04/alzheimers-disease-link-hygiene), all to do with reduced immune efficiency.

I don't want to discuss the quality of that research, but rather the quality of the debate in the attached CiF forum. A large proportion of the commenters had their own theory or critique of this research, 99% of which I'm guessing were based on no actual laboratory or library research, nor any medical qualifications, nor even having read the original paper. Typical first lines ran like: "Actually Alzheimers is linked to medical stupidity"; "The scientists might be onto something here"; "Yet another poorly thought out piece of research"; "I don't buy this theory at all".

Actually this theory isn't for sale, it's being put forward for peer review by people qualified in the field (after a decade or more of scientific training) but once it makes it onto the web, courtesy of the Guardian's Society section, it gets exposed to the bracing winds of our new anti-elitist, hyper-democratic intellectual virtual world. Or to mix metaphors more thoroughly, it's all becoming one big intellectual rugby game in which everyone feels entitled to run with ball for a while, regardless of stature or agility.  

The easy availability of information on any subject whatever - via Google, Wikipedia and the rest - fosters this delusion that we're all now entitled to criticise anything, anywhere and have our critiques (noun, not verb, please) treated as equally important. We second-guess the designers of computers, architects of buildings, medical researchers, based on no real evidence but a raging egoism inflated by promiscuous online reading. To be sure, at the moment it's all just harmless hot air confined to the sphere of online forums, but one can't help worrying what effect it might have in future if kids grow up believing that professional training, peer review and other such institutions designed to protect the quality of information are just oppressive elitism.

Worse still they may come to regard knowledge itself as a competitive game of "I know more than you do". We humans are a fundamentally social species, but this net-reinforced individualism tends to make us into an anti-social species who see life as a zero-sum game with everyone else as a competitor. Actually knowledge is a team game in which you have to learn rules, collaborate with others and practice regularly.