Rating: Not rated
Tags: Political Science, General, Political Ideologies, Democracy, Social Science, Media Studies, Sociology, Lang:en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Added: August 2, 2018
Modified: November 5, 2021
Summary
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed
people to more information than ever before. These societal
gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic
and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled
informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone
knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or
Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an
equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All
voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with
equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed
as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise
shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the
openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer
satisfaction model in higher education, and the
transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour
entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically,
the increasingly democratic dissemination of information,
rather than producing an educated public, has instead created
an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce
intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that
no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions
themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to
technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An
update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The
Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the
alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of
Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground
since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a
warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy
in the Information Age that is even more important today.