I’ve been doing some research for a course I’ll be teaching in a year (longer and more frequent posts about the process to come) when I came across this quote in an RSS4Lib post titled User-Generated Content and Social Discovery in the Academic Library Catalogue: Findings from User Research:
One student said, “I don’t necessarily want the opinion of a professor — I’m looking for people who are as incompetent as I am.”
If you’ve ever wanted evidence of anti-intellectualism and the decentralization of knowledge and expertise, you need look no farther than this quote. I’m starting to think that the trend toward anti-intellectualism in our society is less a refutation of scholarly thought and experience. Instead, I think people are reacting to being patronized or talked down to, and an increasing reliance on the hive mind, or the wisdom of crowds.